UKC

Off the back of the current thread on moving away from meat to reduce our impact on the climate...should/could we/the government mandate that all children should attend a school they can reach on foot, by bike or on public transport? As usual the holidays have highlighted the horrendous impact on traffic that the school run causes and I wonder what UKC's thoughts on this idea are?  My first thought is it would be murder to enforce!

Good thinking, though I think the rule will not work for every school in the UK. But schools could run buses/ minibuses and charge parents (with exemptions or funding possible for some), I've often wondered why the US has those yellow school buses and we don't

School buses are very common in the UK, they're just not yellow or any other particular design so they don't stand out. They're normally run by a bus company, not the school themselves, so they're completely ordinary buses/coaches that also do the school run.

OK problem solved, thanks for that! [I'm not the world's most observant person.... ]

I'd suggest that most children do attend a school they could walk or cycle to. Just that parents are too bloody indulgent, and don't make them... The school I help with DofE allows parents to drive into the school car park so their little darlings don't have to walk the few yards from the road outside. I'd ban them from school premises if I was the head...

Some Scottish schools are trying banning drop offs within a certain radius of the school. 

I have heard plenty of parents saying that they have to drive to work and don't have time to walk the kids to school and then drive to work so drop them off en route.

If we changed the culture so everyone walked like they used to then may be parents would be ok with kids walking on their own (well, with their peers rather than parents taking them)

We need to start as adults and set the example. Over a modest period of time, live within a sensible distance of where we work. Why should children walk if their parents use cars?

It's not going to work in many rural areas.

How far do you reckon it is reasonable to ask a child to cycle every day?

I'm all I'm favour of returning to the system where you just go to the closest school and I'm inclined to suspect that this would give similar results.

Children in London get free use of all the London buses.  Yet still the parents persist in dropping the children off (usually narrowly missing hitting cars and other children) in their bl00dy Chelsea tractors.  Nobody needs an enormous 4 x 4 in London.  ^rant over^

Rural areas already have school buses.

it’s not just culture.  There has been a massive consolidation of schools.  Our village school shut over a decade ago and now the nearest is 4 miles away.  The nearest school I would even consider sending my child to is 6 miles away.  

It’s all well and good to say “nearest school” but until there is a tolerable minimum standard for all schools...

The school in the village where I live is a close and I deliberately walk my son in all weather, despite it being easier to drop him on the way past in the car to work. For me that's probably 400 m of walking, for most parents that would be 1km round trip, only to drive past a few minutes after. There is talk of resuming the walking bus to deal with the traffic issue of 40+ cars around the school (blocked an ambulance a few weeks ago). Catchment for this school extends several miles, but I understand in London some schools are just a handful of roads adjacent to the school.

Ultimately though, if parents are dropping kids and carrying on to work a bus scheme won't have much impact. Car sharing would be much better, but how to encourage.

I suggested that on here a few years ago and got totally shot down for being dictatorial and unreasonable!  

We need to ban private education to get better schools for all.

They’re yellow around Manchester! Run by Belle Vue busses if I remember correctly, occasionally see them either on the school run or taking groups out on trips and the like. 

There are 2 main reasons why people won't let their kids walk to school.

First one is a combination of laziness and time constraints. Parents can't be arsed or don't have time because they have a job to go to.

The next 2 are why kids can't walk without a parent and again it's a combination. I don't know how aware people reading this are but did you know their is a peado behind every tree waiting to snatch the kids and also parent's state that it is too dangerous for the kids because of the volume of traffic on the roads.

On to the Chelsea tractor thing, I know a few guys who have bought their wives massive 4x4s specifically because "it will keep them safer during the school run" 

I lived opposite a school for 20 some years and have heard all the arguments first hand. 

Yes, banning the symptoms often cures the cause.

Although if politicians had to send their children to state schools...

In our case the pick up point for the school bus is over halfway to the school.

It makes sense to use the nearest school and greenest form of transport but clumsy rules will never work in every situation.

Fair enough.   Where I went to school the buses pick up in the centre of all the villages, some parents still drop off at the bus stop but it's only a mile or 2, school is 10 miles so that's a bit better.  Also the kids like going on the bus with friends.  

You’re behind the times.  It’s mummies in pick up trucks outside our daycare these days.  You wouldn’t know it to watch them but it is actually possible to reverse park most pickups in a normal parking space...

I tried a school bus once at secondary school, and hated it. I walked 5km each way rather than take the bus! Primary school bus was fine, but by secondary it seemed to exacerbate the worst of behaviour!

I'm sure the London Oratory would cope...

The school run with cars is a terrible thing . In the UK I'd have been prosecuted for the above, but the queue of cars outside a school is a greater crime.

And obviously there are paedos everywhere, constantly watching....

Same goes if they had to use the NHS. We would see a marked improvement in both education and health care if the policy makers had to use them rather than pay (out of wages payed by our taxes) for a privileged service. 

The kids in my village have to travel 20 miles to the nearest school, so not many parents making the school run here, all on school buses, the nearest public transport is over 7 miles away so that isn't an option either.

Maybe all kids should attend schools a long way off, that would discourage the individual school run.

Why are people in favour of private schooling?

https://www.mirror.co.uk/features/1100-children-injured-during-school-41829...

well if this article is true, then I think the parents have a point. It sounds astonishing, but claims that one third of all child deaths and serious injury are due to road traffic accidents near to school. 

I think the aim should be to have off road cycle paths to most schools, and walking buses to primary schools, but if this is the quality of driving they have to deal with, it’s easy to see why parents drive their kids. 

The article doesn’t state how many children are run over by parents who are driving their children to school.

If the low standard of driving and disregard for the rules of the road which are exhibited by parents at our local school are typical of national behaviour then children are very likely to be squashed by their classmates parents.

Absolutely right. At the Primary school near us there's an off-main-road narrow short tarmac lane [100 metres or so long, with room for one car to drive down between the parked cars] where about a zillion parents park twice a day, each side. I am ABSOLUTELY ASTONISHED sometimes to see parents who've just dropped their kids off zooming down it at about 200 MPH on their way out of the lane to work or wherever. One day soon for sure one of them is going to take out a kid or kids or a family crossing the road and I'm thinking, what, can't you drive slowly down this 100 metres - how much time are you saving, one second?? Incredibly selfish

On behalf of all the hard pressed, amazing teachers out there I can't let this go. There is a tolerable minimum standard already. Schools have got to be the most inspected and most accountable public services in the UK.

Even schools that are graded 'requires improvement' are usually wonderful, high quality, safe places with dedicated staff.

If by minimum standard you mean minimum funding, I agree.

I live 2 minutes walk from our local primary school.

People who live closer than me _drive_ their kids to school.

Same people also drive to the local shop (3 minutes walk) and the pub (2 minutes walk).  We're f*cked make no mistake.

But if YOU don't drive you watch it all from the outside and its actually quite amusing watching individual humans cock it up and causing all sorts of problems for themselves.

I don’t think we will ever agree on this.  

Nor do a lot of parents who struggle to afford their independent school fees.  I know enough children totally failed by local schools despite strong parents support.  

My work is highly active in STEM outreach and I’m more and more worried about the effect exposure to some of the local schools is having on our staff given how much they care about what they’re experiencing and their empathy levels with the pupils.  

It’s great that you trot out your “on behalf of” comment.  I did not speak about the teachers.  A functional school requires a lot more than just high quality teachers and funding, increasingly neither of these are available in sufficient quantities.  If it wasn’t for the above-and-beyond work from a lot of teachers I think the whole thing would be desperately worse.  But this isn’t a positive comment - requiring heroic effort from staff creates black holes of failure at places without heroic staff, and gradually breaks the good staff.

I agree that funding is absolutely dismal and a lot of the problems start there.  This is particularly apparent for children with disabilities in my local area.  I won’t share the experiences of people I know but I doubt you could call them “tolerable”.

Good luck with the public transport bit where we live, and it's not out in the wilds, they've simply got rid of most of it.

So you were talking about funding. In which case we do agree.

I think a lot of the drop off in traffic during school holidays is due to parents taking annual leave whilst their children are off school so not commuting. The trains into London are always quieter during the school holidays but they're not normally full of school kids.

I would love to walk my children to school.

I have young children who didn't get into our village school (we live on the edge of the village) but into a great school 2/3 miles away. The road is the local main road, and the pavement right next to it, all along with cars going 50/60 miles an hour. It just isn't practical to walk along it, it is far too dangerous for 5 year olds.

There is a lovely off road walk through the forest that is fantastic but takes around 40 minutes and has a lot of turns so they would need accompanying. Lots of mud in winter so they would need to carry change of shoes. I also work, so would need to drop them off at school too early in order to get to work on time. This means they would need to go to breakfast club and we would lose our family breakfast time together.

There is no easy answer to this... what is best for our family?

Our solution is that I drop and collect them by car but on the days I am not working, once a fortnight, we walk home, and we encourage their friends to come too. We now have a little group of us that walk back together and it takes about an hour as we look at every stick, puddle, leaf, etc.

Once they are at secondary school they'll be getting the bus, local or school bus, whichever.

Nobody’s answered so I’ll give you an answer. Our kids aren’t old enough for school yet but we have started thinking about it and we’re considering a private school enough to have put a deposit down on a place.

1) The fees for the private school we’re considering are less than nursery costs, so it won’t cost as much as you think when you think ‘private school’.

2) None of the state schools in a reasonable radius of our house are particularly stunning. They’re ok, but not great. 

3) We went for an open day (simply because they put a flyer advertising one through the door) and it looked good. 

4) The reception class had 6 kids and 2 full time teachers. TBH I don’t know what ratio to expect at a state school but I suspect it won’t be that good. Based entirely on my uninformed guesswork, I’d say that the number one important thing in the early years is just the amount of attention the child is going to get from the teachers, so this was a big plus. 

The fact that, in most families, both parents have to work these days is probably the number one factor in the amount of school traffic. 

Delivering 2 kids to school and being able to get to work for enough hours of the day with the clothes/equipment you need for your job requires a car or a very lucky combination of circumstances. 

There is a family near us who do the school run and then on to work on a cargo bike. Such a great bit of kit! (I think it did cost them more than my van, but well done to them for prioritising that!

No. Utterly impractical in rural areas but where it is practical it should be a priority.

jk

That is really good. Unfortunately for us we don’t have anywhere to store such a large, single purpose item as a cargo bike, and of course once you’ve dropped the kids off you’re then left with a rather heavy and cumbersome vehicle for the work commute.

Before giving up work for #2 my wife used to do the nursery drop off on the bike and leave the toddler seat at nursery and then I’d cycle down and pick him up the same way in the afternoon, but that doesn’t work with 2 kids.

We have considered getting one of those tow along trailer things since they don’t require a huge space to store and could be detached at drop off, but those involve your kids being at exhaust pipe height and they’re as good as dead if a car doesn’t notice the trailer, so not great if roads are involved. 

It’s one of those things that looks simple on paper but once you blend in the myriad of other small factors you need that ‘lucky combination of circumstances’ that I mentioned. 

Its also worth noting that all these transport bits aren’t necessarily cheap. The bike seat we’ve got is £110, the extra bracket for the other bike is another £20 (pretty sure both of those are discounted from when we bought them), if we then outgrow that and need a trailer or had the option of a cargo bike..

For a lot of families the two pre-school kids stage of life is a time when money is extremely tight; kids are expensive AND you either pay for nursery or you lose an adults worth of income. Another small incentive for people to use the car and child seats they already have..

Edit: I just had a quick google for how much a cargo bike costs. I had no idea they cost a much! Google reckons £1500+!

Genuine question: could you have two bike seats, one on the handlebars and one on the pannier rack? Used to see lots of parents in the Netherlands cycle around like that.

That does make a difference but in my opinion the biggest factor is the volume of cars I see every school day with 1 parent and 1 child in them. 

My wife and I ride share about 95% of our work day commutes including daycare drop off/pick up.  The down side to this is that our working day is then defined by the earliest start of the two of us and the latest finish - often from the other one of us.  The one of us not driving looses an extra 40 minutes of time each day with the carryon and extra (slow) mile and parking daycare involves.  This costs about 5 parent / child contact hours a week and about 2.5 hours of otherwise productive time.  It’s exhausting and nobody says thanks, and other than the cost saved using the 2nd car there’s no financial incentive.  I can see why a lot of people don’t bother...

It's a bit of a catch 22 situation. There are more accidents because their are more cars on the roads. Reducing the number of cars would reduce the number of accidents but conversely it might make the remaining accidents worse, less traffic will probably lead to faster traffic and that will lead to more traumatic accidents. Also need to factor in the road sense of the kids as well. 40 years ago we did what would now be called the walking bus, a different pair of mums would walk all the kids off the street to primary school, we all learned our green Cross code and no one died. These days though kids are driven door to door and don't get to learn things like road safety because it's not safe for them to do so. 

It's a bit of a catch 22 situation. There are more accidents because their are more cars on the roads. Reducing the number of cars would reduce the number of accidents but conversely it might make the remaining accidents worse, less traffic will probably lead to faster traffic and that will lead to more traumatic accidents. Also need to factor in the road sense of the kids as well. 40 years ago we did what would now be called the walking bus, a different pair of mums would walk all the kids off the street to primary school, we all learned our green Cross code and no one died. These days though kids are driven door to door and don't get to learn things like road safety because it's not safe for them to do so. 

Back in the early 80s, I used to do a combined total of 3.75 miles a day in my paper round and walking to school and back.  Without even considering it - and thats not including PE at school and mucking about in the evenings.  Summer I'd bike my paper round too.  I went from useless at PE to making the athletics team.  The teacher at the time pulled me up and asked how I'd improved so much.  Paper rounds were great : ).  

I think at that time there were only a couple of kids getting dropped off and thats only because they lived in villages outside the area.  School time was just kids swarming to school from every direction.

I often, when work project suit, time my leaving home to coincide with my daughters school start, so I can drop her off on the way. So I'd be one person one child, and yet it's costing nothing extra for the environment.

I agree walking to school is great for kids and is to be encouraged, but I also don't think I should make her just for the sake of it,  when she does plenty of other exercise elsewhere and doesn't need the walk to keep her fit.

In theory it should work, though as I have a road bike the cycling posture is quite forward and doesn’t leave as much space for the front child as other frames would. I think more upright bikes are more common in the Netherlands than they are here, aren’t they?

I think stability would be a bit of a concern with two (again, perhaps easier not on a twitchy road bike) as toddlers do not understand why throwing their weight from side to side is a bad idea. If two kids were doing it at once I think there’d be a genuine safety risk.

The Dutch are quite a lot more pro-cycling with kids than we are, as you might expect. I can’t remember the numbers but the age from which they consider it safe to have a baby on a bike is significantly earlier than in the uk - this could be a reverse of the pro-car bias we have here, as cycling is a much more common way of life there as I understand it. It could be that having to stop cycling because of a child is as disruptive to the way they do things as the idea of giving up the car for the school run is for the uk. 

I'd say mixing with a large number of different people can also be an advantage.

Do you drive your daughter to the places she exercises?

I do laugh when people drive to gyms to then run on a treadmill, or peddle on a static bike

Check the fees for the last few years of senior school and assume they will be going up substantially in excess of inflation every year.   It's good business to make the fees for the first few years affordable and then raise them as the kids get older.  Nobody wants to tell their kids they need to change school when they are settled in and have friends and nobody wants to tell their second or third kid that they can't go to private school when their siblings are going.    

It is, but I’d say more of a factor at an older age. If it was a (exaggerated, hypothetical) choice of a 5 year old getting ignored in a large class of diverse peers or getting a large amount of teacher time in a less diverse class I know which one I’d go for. 

This particular school does a lot of activities that merge multiple years together or out in the community, so it’s not a case of just being with 5 other kids the whole time. 

Yes, it is a catch 22 situation. We build our towns and cities based on the primacy of the car, then expect our children not to use them. 

I was surprised to see that nearly 1/4 of secondary school kids are driven to school, but then you see that the average distance is 3.4 miles. Not many kids are going to walk 7 miles a day. They could cycle, but our roads teally don’t feel safe for kids cycling. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/...

It’s a good point. This place has a flat rate for all years and doesn’t have a single follow on school that all the pupils naturally feed in to, so I don’t think it’ll be a case of having to pull them away from their friends. 

Secondary school is another question that we’ve not even thought about yet. Not a problem until 2029, fortunately! 

Maybe if more kids walked or cycled to school they wouldn't be so fat and unfit. as has been mentioned, a lot of schools near me won't allow parents to drop kids off within a certain distance of the school, this is after air pollution tests were done and it was discovered that the air in the classrooms was worse than the air outside because of all the mummies in 4x4's dropping johnny and jemima off at school in the morning. or because of parents sat waiting in their 4x4's with the engine running to pick the kids up after school. people are far too lazy and it's time something was done about it. never mind david cameron telling us all we need to all drive diesel cars by whatever year he said. is that right david? diesel might have less c02 emissions than petrol so well done there. but petrol fumes don't get stuck in your lungs and eventually kill you. countless studies have shown that breathing in diesel fumes kills more people than smoking. but where are the government health warnings on diesel pumps showing someone in a coffin or a dirty black pair of lungs? why are there no photos showing kids getting a lung full of pollution from the exhaust of mummys 4x4? it's even worse when you see mummy or daddy sat with the engine running while the kids are stood right near the exhaust getting things out of the boot. you aren't allowed to smoke in a car with a child in the car, but letting them breath in the shit coming from the exhaust is fine. what a world we live in.

The School Run. 

Well. You've gone and bl00dy started me now! I frankly can barely conceive  of anything so ridiculous, pathetic and wasteful as the 'school run' habit that has developed over the last several decades. What the hell are you all playing at?

My mother walked 3km each way to get to primary school and the same 3km each way to get the bus to seconary school. A generation later, I either walked 1km though woods and across busy roads or cycled 2km each way to get to primary school. I cycled about 15km per day getting to secondary. 

Now, in a much safer world, where crimes against children are far lower and road deaths are a fraction of what they were 50 years ago, we have to drive the little darlings door to door in air conditioned comfort to schools half a city away from their home where their only contribution to the community is the air pollution they create.

GET A F#CKING GRIP!

The state, at huge expense, built a school down the road from you where your children can walk to in a few minutes if you live in a town or decent sized village. If it's failing then maybe it's because half the local community is not there supporting it. 

And schools for this flavour of human and schools for that flavour. To hell with you all, ONE SCHOOL for your community and you all get stuck in and make it the place that will help make your children, and the friends they make there for life, better happier people. The things they do and talk about walking back and fore to school will mould the world of the next generation as much as what happens in the class room.

Start making this happen now. 

You’d make an excellent policy advisor for Corbyn. I’m not sure he’s got anyone on education yet

Except that with 7 years of primary and 6 years of secondary the total bill for private education is far higher if you do both primary and secondary.    The 7 years of primary school fees could be going into a house which will increase in value.

I went for private school for two kids all the way from primary and looking back on it from a financial viewpoint I'd have been better just going private for secondary or spending the money which went on school fees on an over-priced property in a posh area where the local school was effectively a private school.   It sucks but the UK system is set up to reward people for taking out loans to buy houses.  

Sound like my 80s comp. Yeah friends, good laughs, usually about how dire half the teachers were, as the school churned out factory fodder. Where barely 10% even reached A levels. Schools too scared of the unions to sack incompetent teachers(The decent teachers own words). But oh what a great community, bonded through their shared appreciation of a failing school. I then had to spend my evenings and own time filling in education gaps that had I been more fortunate would have been done years earlier at school.

We had a similar conundrum. A marginal primary near us, a comp that yo yo'd from special measure to good and back again. Completely lottery. Or an outstanding private school that is in effect a feeder school for Eton. 

We just exited for sweden instead. Mid ground education, but also with school friends and all the other social benefits. The money that may have gone on fees, partially goes on tax I suppose, the rest is ours. The bonus being I'm against religion in Schools, uniform etc.. educationally and facilities wise it's probably a world apart from the average UK school. 

The variation in education is startling. We have friends in a Dales school where gym has to be the last lesson as they have no gym or changing facilities, versus those who chose the private school 20miles away with tennis courts, climbing wall etc.. the difference in the kids when we all get together is sadly all the more startling. 

Exactly. 

For any distance up to 3km, more 14 year olds walk to school then go by bus or car. Does anyone think the figure for adults is anywhere near that high? 

We have built sprawling towns, fewer larger secondary schools and allowed parents to choose their school (more than 50% of secondary students don’t go to the nearest school). This means the average secondary school journey has doubled in the past 20 years. 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353829214001592

That’s interesting, thanks. 

We really don’t want to move location so we’re working with the options available here. Probably means we’ll end up with a small house compared to a lot of our peers, but we’re trying to fight the common trend to keep upgrading until you’re in something that will keep you in mortgage debt for years and years. 

In summary then it's a complete sh*tshow! It would be great if we could have a similar ethical shift to decreasing car use that we seem to be having away from eating meat but I can't see any sign of it happening.  My small market town has had estate, after estate, after estate built on the outskirts with 0 public transport, 0 bike lanes and sod all other infrastructure.  Grrrrr.

We live in a very rural area, about 90% of the kids at our local primary school are on the school bus because the live more than 3 miles away, for my kids it’s 6 miles.  

School bus does the job well but it doesn’t stop folk like my neighbour getting his car out most days to drive his daughter 100m up our shared driveway, turn round after she’s got in the bus, then drive home.

My school (Primary) is in a very remote location but has 60 pupils. We have catchment children living 4 miles away. All catchment children get a free, county paid for but privately operated, mini bus to school. We also run our own bus, which parent pay for, for about 14 non catchment children. The rest come by car. There is no footway near are school and the area around the school is extremely hilly so walking and cycling are a challenge. However, some children do bike/walk including my 2 but they are especially hard core. 

No she runs there, it's her warm up she says. sometimes I pick her up if it coincides with me coming home anyway.

This is not realistic. There is a school in our village, but my children didn't get a place at it. Their school isn't 2km away like yours was, it is nearly 3 miles on a main A road into Manchester. Walking there is not building a community, it is lonely, unpleasant and dangerous. Two generations ago it would have been a country lane and would have been a totally different experience.

My point is, you can't turn the clock back to a rural way of life with a less dense population. You need to find ways to live healthily with nature and our environment that are a solution for today, not 1940. Car shares might be the answer, or a walking bus, but 'start making this happen now' is not practical.

Happily, my daughter's school is ~ half a mile from our house, the pre-school is slightly closer and we don't need to cross any main roads, so we can easily walk/scooter there and back. It helps that my wife and I can both work from home some of the time.

We do, very occasionally, use the car if we're going to/from the office or the weather is truly foul.

Only staff cars are allowed on the school premises during school hours. Some of the parking by the parents around the school is terrible - including ignoring the residents only signs on a couple of roads.

Works well on a Dutch bike with a step-through frame and the right front bike seat.

Doesn't work - and I've tried it - on a typical hybrid with any sort of cross bar and a WeeRide up front.

You can usually identify them by them having very high numbers - 6xx is quite a common range in many areas but it varies.  They're usually technically public bus services because that allows the operator to claim some relief against fuel tax (BSOG).

I hate treadmill running, it's terminally tedious.  Being outside is the main thing I like about running.

That said, I do sometimes drive to the gym, either if the weather is crap or if I haven't got quite as long as I might want.  Cycling there and back and an hour doing resistance type stuff takes me a 2 and a bit hour slot.  Running would make it 2.5 or so.  And I rarely want to cycle home when I'm knackered.  That said, once my shin splints have recovered a bit more I might try running there and getting the bus home.

I'd want to ask the question of your local Council - why?  In MK, all new estates are being built with a proper network of Redways (dedicated cycle/pedestrian paths) and planning gain is used to fund a usable bus service from day one, usually about 5 years' funding for a half hourly all-day service plus hourly evening and Sunday is the bare minimum, and that's usually enough to establish it enough for it to last in some commercial form.

And that's in the city of the car.  You're in Bristol, which is much more of a cycling and public transport city (even if FirstGroup is terrible).  And isn't the mayor an obsessive cyclist?

What gives I wonder?

I got the best top trump ever for school parking earlier today. A bloke phoned my company to complain about one of my lads so as is the way the call was forwarded to me. This guy was kicking off in a big way because one of my vans was parked in "his spot" and obstructing him from parking in "his spot" and going about his business.

I opened the tracker and found the van in question, it was one of my guys who is off this week due to school holidays and child minding. His van was parked on the street outside his house perfectly legally but according to this guy the van was parked in the spot that he parks in every day to drop his kids at school. Apparently he was going to the school during the holiday for some reason and felt the need to ring and complain. 

I am currently trying to get the council to extend a 30 Mph zone by c.20m and add a speed hump to make it safer for my kids and others who walk to school.....the answer back is basically no one has yet been injured/killed so we won't do anything about it.....despite numerous near misses I have personally witnessed and it being an obvious hazard.

I am on the verge of getting militant and knocking on windows and asking people to turn their engines off who are sat outside school with their kids in the car/waiting for them but am fearful of an aggressive response (I wonder what goes through people's heads who do this). 

Given people's disregard for residents I am hoping it will get to the point where yellow lines are put in round the school to shift the immediate pollution issue away from my kids lungs.

I liv 50 yards from a junior school.

It’s absolute bedlam at certain times of the day.

Some parents will park where they want whether there’s yellow lines or not.

They’ll drive too fast, park across driveways, leave their engines running, play loud music, etc.

We’ve had stand up rows between parents and residents and teachers told to F off when asking parents to park with consideration.

All this in a leafy suburb with middle class parents.

I wish you luck in your attempts to keep children safe.  

SMH

People are nuts, eh...?

True I am near Bristol, but technically I am in Bath and North East Somerset.  The conspiracy theorists would have you believe that BANES is fulfilling it's housing quotas by...building on the outskirts of Bristol : ( .   As for the Bristol mayor I think you are thinking of the old Mayor George (red cords) Ferguson.  We now have Marvin (hard man) Rees.

I sometimes knock on a window to let other parents know that rather than parking on the footpath outside daycare they could use the giant car park 15 meters further away down the footpath they just blocked.  Despite my naturally charming personality I have received nothing but torrents of abuse including complaints to the daycare staff about me.   As I have told the day care staff, they can choose to turn a blind eye to dangerous parking by their customers outside their premises but I bloody well won’t. 

I don’t trust myself to remain so calm with the bloody morons who sit there running what are inevitably shitbag old diesels for 10 minutes+ whilst they wait for their partner.  There’s one parent who leaves their child in the car with the engine running and no adults present.  Abject bloody moron.

There is some of that near MK in Aylesbury Vale and Northants, and we don't appreciate it either.  I don't object to building (you can't live in a New Town and object to building) but the new bits do need bringing into the MK Council area.

Well I think you'll find that far from being not realistic it is the only way that this gets fixed. Unfortunately, you, or your descendents, will eventually have to accept that you do not live in a civilised country. You live in one which fails in the most basic requirements of civilised government and whose basic social and economic needs are overshadowed by an impossible obsession with property values, anachronistic class-based political frameworks, and pointless authoritarianism. 

The arithmetic for this stuff is really simple. A certain population requires a certain number of school places and proper functioning local government provides that along with sensible infrastructure that enables safe passage. That happens in other countries and it was happening where I grew up in the 1960s. The idea that it cannot happen in a rich NW European country in the 21st century is ludicrous.