AN old bus has proved just the ticket to set people on the right road to a better education.

For pupils at Lord's House Farm special educational needs centre, in Rishton, have been put well and truly in the driving seat after snapping up Blackburn Transport's former number seven double decker.

The centre is a registered NVQ establishment, designed and built to cater for a wide range of needs for the disabled community and delivers a variety of courses, including small animal care, horse care, basic conservation skills, computers and independent living skills.

Workers at Lord's House are now planning to turn the 20-year-old vehicle into a jungle themed classroom.

It recently reached the end of its road transporting schoolchildren across the borough, .

And number seven proved lucky for this bus as it was due to be taken to the scrapheap in the next few months.

The 76-seater vehicles, which was worth about £40,000 in its hey day, was sold to the charity for a 'nominal' fee and improvement works on it are expected to start in the next couple of days.

Now plans to transform the vehicle into the wonderland safari include painting the lower saloon with black and white stripes into a zebra-like common room, removing the upstairs seats to make a classroom and filling it with tropical plants, repainting the outside of the bus and surrounding it with more plants and shrubs.

The front of the vehicle will remain in the fleet's traditional blue and cream colours as a reminder that it was donated by the borough's transport department.

Mary Walker, centre administrator, said: "We decided we needed extra classroom space quite early on in the year and wrote to Blackburn Transport when we came up with the idea of having a playbus type arrangement.

"It was lucky we wrote when we did because it was heading for the scrap heap.

"It's great that Blackburn Transport came up with the bus because we didn't have the funds to build a classroom and it would have taken months to raise the money and then build it as well. Hopefully it will make learning much more easy and fun. It's certainly a novel way of working.

Michael Morton, Blackburn Transport's managing director, said: "We are very pleased to be involved in this project.

"Blackburn Transport is very much part of the East Lancashire community and we felt that this was an excellent way of showing our commitment to it.

"We received the fax from Lord's House literally in the nick of time. Number seven was just on its way to the scrap yard.

"It will be a permanent reminder and a useful asset for Lord's House Farm which hopefully will provide them with a better way of learning."