cybertect
It's grim up north (London)
Shmu said:
I don't doubt that for one second. Congestion is a classic case of the Tragedy of the Commons.
Shmu said:
I don't think I've characterised any parents as "silly mummies" or "lazy slobs" (from Poot's earlier post). It would be demeaning to parents and devalue the debate.
The reason that the school run is of particular significance is that it is one pattern of transport use over which government perhaps has a relatively direct influence through education policy.
While it doesn't stand in isolation from other issues, I believe that various administrations have inadvertently contributed to creating a situation in which many parents have little choice but to ferry their children to school.
Before the mid 1960s, children would likely attend a grammar, secondary modern or secondary technical school located very close to their homes. These were typically quite small with only a few hundred pupils, this being reflected in the size of their catchment areas. Pupils could commute easily on foot or by bicycle. Parents who did work could accompany their children with a minimal time impact.
The creation of comprehensive schools from the 60s onward provoked the amalgamation of schools of all three types to create large intakes with a broad social and educational mix, drawing from much wider catchment areas and inevitably requiring pupils to travel further every day.
Disaffection with the comprehensive model that gathered pace through the 1980s (largely a middle class phenomenon, apparently) resulted in parents adopting two strategies to secure a better education for their children.
- placing their children in selective or private schools that were further afield than their local comprehensives.
- moving house to the catchment areas of schools that were perceived as providing higher standards.
In either case, additional income was required to support either of these strategies. Paying for private education has obvious costs, moving house is less direct, but no less real.
Against a background of general inflation in real terms of the housing market, the education factor has played a significant part in driving up house prices in some parts of the country. A single income was no longer sufficient to pay for a mortgage, putting additional time pressures on both parents, but more often a mother, who wanted to ensure their children got to school safely.
The Tories' recent open discussion of abolishing catchment areas entirely to help remedy the social and educational inequalities that result from this would clearly lead to children travelling from even further afield. Some education authorities, such as Leeds, have been considering breaking the traditional 'sibling link' criteria that give admission priority to children where their brothers or sisters are already attending a school, which is likely to lead to yet more geographical fragmentation.
It may not be representative of the reality of the situation elsewhere, but that the upper middle classes, particularly in central London where the media tend to concentrate their attentions, were the pioneers of this behaviour has helped set the debate in terms of class and create the stereotypes of rich kids being delivered to school in Chelsea Tractors.
None of this has occurred in isolation from other factors in society. Rising car ownership and use has made the roads themselves more dangerous, deterring the use of walking and cycling. There is an often-unrecognised effect of the motor car on the very structure of towns which leads to lower density of settlement with residential and other facilities widely dispersed.
Outside London, the negative effects of the 1985 Transport Act which deregulated the bus industry has made bus travel less attractive for many journeys than it was in the past. There are other fears about the personal safety of children from attacks on their journeys home which, justified or not, have helped provide some people with reasons not to let their children journey alone. How significant these issues are when compared with the more practical ones of physically getting a child onto a bus would be one of the more interesting aspects of the results of beeboo's research.
It would be foolish attempt to say whether a child in a car is any more worthy of road space than any other person, except to to observe that if we're to be serious about tackling our energy concerns, we need to find ways of promoting low-energy local journeys over the longer, more energy-intensive ones.
I'll stick my hand up and confess that all of this is reasoned conjecture on my part, based on the evidence I see around me. I'd genuinely be interested to discover if children today are travelling further to school (which is the most fundamental metric) than their counterparts of forty of fifty years ago.
Changing patterns of education may prove a more tractable question in the short to medium term than a wholesale recasting of our work patterns and urban planning structures. I don't want to overstate the case, but people in their early 20s of my acquaintance have cheerfully claimed that they've never been on a bus in their lives and would never consider using one. That genuinely worries me.
