Walking to school

The only real options I see are that you make clear to the school that this is none of your doing and then offer your son the choices of: continue as is with the knowledge that he has no responsibility for the younger sibling, leave a few minutes earlier/later and don’t walk with his friend, you will take him in.

Ignore it. The responsibility, if any, lies with your son's mate (the sibling of the younger kid). Explain that to your son and carry on as normal.

The school can’t decide this. It’s up to the parent. Explain this to your child and let the school and parents thrash it out together.

Tell your son he has no obligation to walk with friend and sibling. He can chose a different route or time.

In my opinion it's not the school's business if parents feel that their child is mature enough to walk to school. Whether the parents are right or not is their look out. The age children are usually allowed to walk to school in England is much higher than most other European countries, including I believe some other UK countries, so it is unlikely to be a case of objective inappropriateness. Unless the younger sibling is 4 or 5?

Stay well out of it and tell your son it's not his responsibility to worry about this. He doesn't need to look after the other kid and he doesn't need to walk with them if the younger one is bothering him.

How offensive that the school is dictating how much autonomy parents give their children outside of school hours.

and no wonder school staff are always complaining they are overworked if they keep putting resources into things that are nothing to do with them. maybe instead of always demanding budget increases they should look at areas they can scale back.

Tell your son to either ignore the younger child or not walk with them, its not his problem or responsibility, the parents of those children will have to figure things out with the school.

Except that in this case, another of their pupils is suffering from the parents' decision to allow a young child to walk without an adult. The school's intervention might prevent this.

Many schools have a policy on the age at which children may walk alone, and I suspect many parents are quite grateful. If your child wants to walk alone but is perhaps not yet mature enough, it's bound to be harder to say no if other kids in the same class are doing so.

As this is affecting your son I would tell your son he cannot walk with the other child. Mine had an issue with another child but they were in year 7 and my son said I will not walk with you so do not wait for me, do not catch me up otherwise my parent will just give me a lift to school so whichever way you think this will play out, we will not be walking together.

This would be harder for your child but he can tell the other child no to walking together. He could tell the teacher that this child is walking with him after explicitly telling him not to if that happened and why he doesn't want them walking together.

Schools are allowed to have policies as this is about safeguarding. My children went to a school near 70mph dual carriageway that half the children had to cross to get to school. They crossed at a junction with traffic lights so it was year 6 only who could walk home alone.

@muggart you would get a parent saying their 5 year old could walk themselves to and from school this is why schools have policies. Some parents literally cannot be arsed to take their child to school.