Faith schools will have to organise their own transport for pupils in future as part of Wiltshire Council plans to save up to £162,000.

Children who attend Roman Catholic primary and secondary schools currently travel on subsidised buses run by Wiltshire Council if they do not live close by. Parents pay around £400 on top of Wiltshire Council’s funding to use the services.

But at a meeting on Tuesday, cabinet members decided to stop the subsidy after all pupils who currently receive it have turned 16, a move which has angered many Catholic parents.

Wiltshire Council had originally hoped to withdraw funding from September 2012, but a concession was given after complaints.

But Conservative councillors refused to keep responsibility for running buses and told schools to do it themselves from next September.

Rita McLoughlin, head teacher at St Patrick’s Catholic Primary School in Corsham, said: “We find ourselves totally crushed by this proposal. We don’t have the expertise or capacity to organise our own transport and the council promising to assist us by providing a list of bus companies for us to contact is hardly good enough.

“We are in the business of teaching children, not running our own bus company.”

Ten-year-old pupil Willow Kayne was greeted with a round of applause as she stood up with her friend Lauren Wales, ten, to deliver a message to council leader Jane Scott at the meeting in Trowbridge.

Willow, who travels from Melksham each day on the subsidised bus, said: “I just want to go to the same school as my older sister and I’m worried that now I’m not going to be able to go there.”

Her mother Emma Kayne, who is a teaching assistant at the school, said: “The decision will put parents and schools alike in an impossible situation because, while the existing children will still be subsidised, the cost of running the transport ourselves will be much greater.”

Schools such as St Patrick’s, where pupil numbers needing transport are smaller, could receive extra help from the council by increasing the subsidy they provide until it is withdrawn, while larger schools get less.

Father Jean-Patrice Coulon, parish priest at the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in Devizes and a governor of St Joseph’s Primary School, said he was “not pleased that the cabinet rejected the advice of its own Children’s Services Select Committee”.