To hell and back on the school run

Taking pupils by car creates pollution, traffic jams and 'battery reared children'. Louise Jury reports

On A busy city road, there are two lines of traffic. One is of vans, buses and cars taking people to work. The other is of mums and dads on the inside lane enduring school-run hell.

As children went back to their desks last week, the return of the school- gate snarl-up was noticeable even to those blissfully ignorant of the details of the educational calendar.

School runs mean stress. According to a survey published by the Automobile Association and Skoda cars last week, taking the children to school is fraught with problems. Eighty per cent of those questioned felt that their driving deteriorated when running late for school. Seventy per cent were affected by their children misbehaving.

And if it is bad for the parents, it is worse for the children. Research by the Policy Studies Institute has shown that children have much less freedom of movement in Britain than in continental Europe, and that this could be damaging their health and confidence. "We are creating a generation of battery-reared children," says the researcher, Dr Mayer Hillman.

Then there is pollution. Thirty per cent of parents with children aged five to 11 drive them to school every day, and a quarter of all school runs are of a mile or less. These journeys have been found to account for 20 per cent of rush-hour traffic.

Outside Canonbury Infants School in Islington, north London, the first cars arrive just after 8.30am. It is three-quarters of an hour before the school run ends. For every two or three children walking with hand grasped by a parent, there appears to be another arriving by car. The occasional infant cycles in.

"We would come by bus but we would have to get up a lot earlier," says one mother as her seven-year-old son jumped out of the car. Another says: "I only bring the car when I've got to go straight out. Otherwise we walk. But they're too young to come on their own."

The driving factor - so to speak - behind this madness is fear. Fear not just of the lurking pervert but of the danger from the amount of traffic.

Even those who walk to school have to endure pollution, the by-product of all those extra car journeys. Journeys under two miles, where the car barely has time to warm up and gets stuck in traffic, are the biggest polluters of the lot, even if you have a catalytic converter.

Outside Canonbury Infants, Simon Hilliard, 35, arrives with Taidg, eight, and Roisin, six. "If it was a little bit more pedestrianised and the whole of the inner city was policed I wouldn't be worried," he says. "But as it is, I wouldn't allow my children to come on their own. The whole thing needs looking at."

Sometimes he drops them off by car instead of walking when he is on his way to work in removals. Sometimes he ends up doing so because, he admits, he has left things late. "I want to be told by the Government that we can't have cars any more and they would then have to have cheaper public transport and more cycle lanes," he says.

Anne Hollows, 45, a university lecturer, alternates bringing Caitlin, eight, the one-and-a-half miles to school by bicycle and car, depending on her work schedule and those of her partner and childminder. "On wet days we sometimes come on the bus. It's good experience for children to understand transport."

She would not allow her child to walk or cycle alone. "I would be more worried about the traffic than about who's around. I think you can sometimes be over-anxious about that."

Margaret Morrisey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teachers Associations, says safety and transport come up repeatedly in letters from parents concerned about their offspring's well-being. Yet the Government's emphasis on parental choice has only made the problem worse by increasing the numbers of children travelling farther afield.

In some areas, attending the desired school is only possible by the sharing of the journeys between parents and this means drivers contending with up to five youngsters in a car. Ms Morrissey said: "It's something we're beginning to be conscious of, but safety-wise I don't think it's being addressed. I think we may have to consider safety guidelines."

Matthew Joint, the AA's head of behavioural analysis, contends that it is wrong to blame the parents for the volume of traffic - "Particularly with the general lack of public transport, parents feel obliged to take their kids to school. It is up to the Government to start changing the infrastructure in order to encourage change."

Dr Hillman, the senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, agrees - but he questions the all too familiar emphasis on public transport. "Able-bodied parents escorting able-bodied children to school out of fear is one of the more disturbing by-products of our society," he says.

Dr Hillman advocates a return to the days of an institution that once played such a vital role in the life of a school - the bikesheds. The answer to how to reduce reliance on the car is not trains and buses, he says, but walking and, most of all, cycling. "The Government," he reckons, "is at long last accepting that ... primacy should not be given to the motorist."

He points out that 2,000 kilometres of cyclepath in London could be provided for the cost of just 400 metres of the Jubilee Line extension to the London Underground. In the Netherlands, 14 times more journeys are made by bicycle than by all public transport systems put together.

Dr Hillman adds: "One must sympathise with these parents who instinctively, and understandably, wish to minimise the risk of injury to their child. But children are not being allowed to roam freely and gain those essential coping and practical skills which can only be properly learned by making mistakes."