To think that if you object to parents collecting their children from school...

[EvilTwins]

...you shouldn't buy a house near one?

My DCs attend a large and popular primary school, built in the 1950s, which is at the end of a cul-de-sac in the middle of a large, privately owned, mostly 1950s and 1960s housing estate. The school has asked parents not to park on the actual cul-de-sac when they're picking up their DCs, and this is adhered to. However, it means that parents park their cars in neighbouring residential streets. Obviously everyone arrives at pretty much the same time, so there is a 20 minute period, twice a day, when the three or four streets surrounding the school are full of parked cars. About twice a term, we get letters home telling parents that local residents have complained about this. We're never offered a solution.

This only really affects me on a Friday, as my DCs go to after school club Monday-Thursday, but even considering that, I'm starting to get fed up with the letters home telling us off.

So AIBU? The school must pre-date the majority of the residents. If you choose to buy a house within spitting distance of an enormous primary school, shouldn't you just accept that parents might need to park in your road to drop their children off?

I live opposite a school. When I bought the house I knew the school was there.

However I also knew that the street is fully resident-permit-parking only. We get ONE pass per household. If people come to visit us and have a car, they have to park several streets away or in a pay car park a few hundred yards away. Which they do.

The majority of the dropping off parents, however, don't. They care very little for the fact it is permit only, they block residents into their driveways, destroy the nicely tended grass verges, double park.

Five doors down, my neighbour has a daughter who is wheelchair bound and attends a day centre. Her house is suitably altered with ramps, they have an enlarged driveway with a wheelchair friendly car with hoist, stickers all over the back of the car saying 'please mind my wheelchair' and such. The road outside is marked as a long disabled bay so they can always get in and out with the day centre van etc.

Of course, the day centre van picks up and drops off at school time, and EVERY DAY there are people parked across their driveway in the disabled bay, EVERY DAY I roll my eyes with my neighbour as the day centre van tries desperately to scrape enough space to park up and help A off in her wheelchair. There are many people on the access bus, and all are held up, daily.

The school reminds the parents that it is permit parking only every so often at the bottom of the school newsletter. The teachers have told me themselves they don't see the problem because they are always in their classrooms. Traffic wardens DO come but only ever get one car as all the other cars vamoose when they are writing one ticket! To avoid the wardens, a lot of the time people stay in their cars OR leave their younger children in the cars in the mistaken belief it's not a parked car if someone is in it. Of course that means there are a ton of children weaving through the parked cars finding their parents, and babies and toddlers locked in vehicles.

The school does have a car park. The school has a TON of outside space - fields, woods, pond, farm, waste land where they have knocked down classrooms. They do nothing.

So, IMO, YABU.

YABU. We bought a house next door to a school. I have absolutely no problem with the majority of parents parking. The school serves a large, rural community and the vast majority of children are bussed in from the surrounding villages or are local enough to walk. Very few arrive by car.

However, this is spoilt by the utterly twattish minority who just cannot see why it is a massive problem for me when they park across my driveway and block my car in. I've even had parents refusing to move their car to allow me to get out on the grounds that they will 'only be another 10 minutes or so'.

Yes but I need to pick my children up too. Which involves a round trip twice a day of 50 miles. Yet there are still parents parked across my drive before I need to leave on my marathon school run.

And they can't get into this school next door as it is oversubscribed. Neither can they get the school buses (which go past my house) as they are not in catchment. Yet both buses go from the towns the DDs are at school in to our town. Or get a public bus because the buses to our town both leave the girls schools before the sodding schools finish

They are a fecking nusiance and I wish we could introduce proper yellow school buses that all children could get.