How many people do drive their kids to school?

The government has just published a set of indicators indicating how children got to school across the country last year broken down into primary and secondary age groups. A graph based on the percentage of children walking, cycling or taking public transport to primary and secondary schools organised with the authority with the lowest rate on the left and the highest on the right comes out like this. The red line if for primary age children and the brown line for secondary.

Getting to school 2009-2010 by Authority

It shows that even in the authorities with the lowest rates for primary schools there are nearly 50% of children walking/cycling etc and that in the highest it is up to about 90%. The average across the country is about 63% for primary and 70% for secondary.

The papers claimed that the statistics showed that the schools with the highest driving rates were the rich and rural ones and the ones with the lowest were urban and not so rich. It isn’t actually that clear – here are the only ones where more than 50% of children are being driven: Herefordshire, Windsor and Maidenhead, Solihull, Cornwall, Surrey, St. Helens and Sefton.

The London borough feature prominently in the list of places with the lowest driving rate with Portsmouth being the most interesting inclusion – Portsmouth also has been pioneering area-wide 20mph speed limits with very encouraging results. Here are the ones with over 80% walking etc starting with the highest: City of London, Islington, Camden, Westminster, Isles of Scilly, Newham, Hammersmith and Fulham, Tower Hamlets, Southwark, Lambeth, Kensington and Chelsea, Hackney, Portsmouth.

The slight anomalies for the rates for secondary schools to the right of the graph are probably data errors. The blip down to 40% is for Brighton and Hove and the one to 50% is for Ealing.

My conclusion is that it is a minority of parent who are causing all this trouble and one should bear in mind that many of the ones who do drive will park their vehicles some way from the school gates and walk the final section. I suspect that there is a lot of self selection of drivers going on which results and that ‘die hard drivers’ and ‘complacent car addicts’ are well represented outside the school gates.