This morning's commute and other commuting stories

As a campaigning topic, the school run is as old as the hills, and a lot of work has been done on it in the last few decades. It ties into the whole 'active kids' agenda, and much progress has been made using School Travel Plans, so much so that where I live, in Hackney, the school run isn't a very significant concern any longer. That may change again, of course, but the trend is that more and more schools are being opened as the population increases, and at least in Hackney, schools have also benefited from much better funding and increasing reputation. I realise that's not the case everywhere, but as that's my experience, all the following is going to reflect it. There are obviously problems of greater distance to school elsewhere, such as Damo's experience with kids going to Bexley.

One caveat is that the school run is an often overstated problem. This is because the real problem behind it is obviously car commuting. Very few parents only take the kids to school by car and then return home. Most go on to somewhere else, be it work or shopping etc. What happens is simply that these trips get pooled into one. I've always found it very interesting that it's the school run aspect of these trips that gets attacked the most. People often attack the easiest target (I'm not saying you are, by the way, it's perfectly valid to notice it as an issue, but in my campaigning experience it's been an issue that has sometimes prevented progress on other things and drowned out what people wanted to say about more significant issues), as they know they can't attack the hard targets, such as the perception of the car as the 'universal transport tool' that's great for everything and that really helps with life. I mean, just think about it, you can plonk the kids in the car, unload them, and then put the shopping where the kids were. Or something. You can also arrive at work looking smart and smelling fresh as a daisy. That sort of perception is the real problem, not the school run. A lot of people think it's simply safer to take kids to school by car. Well, as Mayer Hillman and John Adams have shown, it's not that simple, but I think it's a non-starter to attack people where they're trying, albeit mistakenly, to keep their children safe.

The main reason why the issue is so visible is largely because of the nasty scenes that often play out in front of school gates (I've witnessed a few). However, in statistical terms the issue is really not a priority compared to the other, more major problems behind it. Also, again, it's obviously different in Outer London compared to Hackney. I'm not going to deny that where travel distances to schools are long, it's still a significant problem. @IdealStandard used to work on school travel plans for the Dulwich school cluster, to which many pupils travel from far afield, so he could probably add a few things about that.

Again for Hackney, at primary school, most children walk to school, and the percentage has increased by about ten percent as car travel has gone down. There's never going to be a significant percentage of kids cycling to primary school here, as the vast majority of primary school age children live within a couple of hundred yards of their school, and getting the bike out etc. is just too much faff, never mind bike sheds at school. A good few parents do take kids on child seats or in cargo bikes, but like drivers those are parents who go on to somewhere else. Most Hackney parents would take public transport to continue their trip.

At secondary school level, the vast majority of kids walk or use public transport. There, travel distances increase considerably, as in Damo's Bexley-bound kids, and much more progress could be achieved for cycling, but with increased distances comes greater perception of road danger by parents, too. Also, kids increasingly make their own decisions at those ages, and cycling is simply not seen as 'cool' in most areas when kids are that age, e.g. you might get wet, and then what about your school uniform?

Anyway, it's far from being an ignored issue, and as ever the work has to continue.

Good people to contact are local school travel plan officers, but headteachers or school travel plan representatives in schools will be in touch with them, anyway. All schools should have such plans, and if you're a parent/governor, you can help influence them, as some are, quite frankly, not very good (not in Hackney, of course :) ) and need gradual improvement. As indicated above, the key factors are distances and trip concatenation, and both of those need concerted action at all levels of local authorities, from land use planning to social work, but it's not an intractable problem.

A great book, for those who want to do some work on it as a parent, is 'Let Me Out' by Ann Kenrick (LCC chair). It came out in 2009, so is still pretty up-to-date. It's conceived as a resource for parents and other people who want to campaign around their local school.