To not understand why so many people drive their dc to and from secondary school?

[Dancergirl]

Surely once at secondary school dc should get themselves to and from unless it's really not possible to get there by public transport?

Someone I know - her dd has started Year 7 at a local secondary. There is an easy and convenient school bus. But she's driving her and picking up every day even though she also has younger dc at primary!

At dd1's school (she's currently Year 8), it seems lots of her friends are driven to and from. Some live locally and there are very good public transport links.

Why?? Am I missing something?

But as something like 80% of the population in England live in Urban areas then it is still a valid debate. No?

But many schools are still in the same buildings as they were a generation ago. There are lots and lots of corridors....space for lockers?

Or put a set of lockers in each form room. I've seen that before in a secondary school. Pupils take what they need for the morning's lessons and put the rest away. At lunchtime they take what they need for the afternoon. There are ways round it, even in a big school.

i should imagine that once my dd is old enough for school - whether its primary or secondary, both my DH and i will still be going to work all day every day, and so it will make sense for us all to head off together in a car and i'll be dropped at the station, my dd at school and my dh will head on to work... surely that's just effeciency/logic.

Goldmandra - not really, I went to secondary school in the early 90s and there were no clockrooms or lockers, it was a given you would lug all this stuff about all day. all my friends who went to other schools in the area I knew though my hobbies did the same, having a very big school bag was important, but unfashionable. It was very exciting when one of the other schools in the area got lockers. (My school didn't)

OP, I would flip this question about - if you are a SAHM, how would you justify not taking your DCs on the school run? Why would anyone pay out for buses and make their DCs stand around in the cold having significantly longer days (the DCs I see waiting for the school bus near us are at the bus stop for a 7:45am pick up, most are already there from 7:30am as there's only one bus, you miss it and you're screwed, but the drive is 20-30 minutes max.). Being tied to a school bus time makes before and after school activities impossible for most to take part in. If you are working, then your DCs have no choice, but if as a family you've sacrificed one wage in order to have a parent around before and after school, surely the school run is part of their 'job'?

I think if you live in London you have a different mindset, it's not just the public transport, it's everything is physically closer. You have so many people living in each square mile, that the local school is just that, local. councils might serve a larger number of people than some in the rest of the country, but htey do it over a physically smaller space. It's easier and cheaper to provide buses if the bus run only needs to be 20 minutes long to fill it. It's easy and cheap to provide a bus if you are be certain you'll fill it.

Oh still valid debate, of course.

Just that OP is narrowing down the parameters for what constitutes 'no good reason' all the time.

We have established that cost, convenience, bullying, SEN, and reliability of transport, are all good enough reasons to drive kids to school. OP is asking for posters who have none of these good reasons and still drive their kids in. Are there really that many? Given, as you say quite rightly bigmouth, that 80% of the population in England live in urban areas with a decent transport system. And that in the places where the magoity of kids are being driven in we don;t have a congestion problem.

Mine has to take her school uniform coat off at the gates, they're also not allowed to wear their coat to school at all until they give permission

Having no locker means she has to cart it around with her all day, so she generally doesn't bother wearing one.

With the awful wet weather we've had this week she's left with the choice of carting a sopping wet coat around, or going coatless and wearing a wet blazer all day. Neither choices are particularly pleasant so I give her a lift.

Our blazers are shit as well, no warmth in them when it's cold, and they boil you alive when it's hot - we also have the blazers aren't allowed to be taken off rule too.

Bigmouth, urban doesn't mean city. I live in a town. It's classed as urban. It's in a county with the 11+ but no grammer in the town so 1500 children are bused or driven out of the town to the next one for school. Even if they got rid of the 11+, there still would not be enough places for an extra 1500 pupils in our town as the secondary modern high school doesn't have many spare places, so a large number would still have to be bussed/driven to the next town.

Nope - taking children to school is part of my 'job' until they are old enough to do it themselves - I don't take ds to school - I could drag the younger girls with me on a 20-25 minute round trip to walk ds then walk them to their school (just about) - but why would I do that?

I meet ds from school one day a week - his football club finishes after it gets dark (at the moment anyway), he wanted me to meet him and I am happy to do that. His sisters complain but it does them no harm.

I justify my existence in other ways their Dad gets to be the Taxi service evenings and weekends - when required - but we still use the train for cinema trips and some days out.

Well my OH drives past the place so he drops DD off. She makes her own way home. So it's very convenient for her to get a lift, if he was not going in work on a certain day she would just get the bus.

Oh I get that - but Most people do not live completely cut off from alternatives to the car - the alternatives are there sometimes more expensive/ often less convenient/ poorly maintained... I know I live in such an area but as a non-driver I still can get around. I just do.

Our High school is in the next town - there is not one in the village and there are Independent schools in the county town that children get to on the train. They walk and bus and train there - they do not have to be driven - that is a choice made for a variety of reasons.

Yes, we made that choice.

But because of the way the buses run, there is only one 'choice' of school accessible to us by public transport. Our bus routes are sort of arranged like spokes of a wheel around the nearest big town, with the secondaries dotted around on the spokes, all several miles out.

I suppose, at a pinch, DS could travel into town (10 miles) by bus, and out again (8 miles) by train or bus, then walk to his school. It would take a good 1.5 to 2 hours, though.

It's certainly something we thought about a lot before changing his school -- that we were tying ourselves down to a lot of lift-giving for the next few years.

I was driven to school and picked up, it took 2 hours on the bus or a ten minute car journey. The bus took so long as there wasn't a direct bus route to my school so I had to take two buses one of which went away from my school and got caught in traffic along the way.

I was at a school near Bournemouth for a while. I seem to remember kids from the local villages going to and from school by train. As for lockers at that school.....don't remember

I did start to cycle but soon stopped when some woman decided that although I was already on the roundabout it was her right of way and pulled out in front of me missing hitting me by cm's and then proceeding to shout and scream obscenities at me.

Our schools have up to 6000 students in them and every student had a locker. Not impossible.

lockers are the least important thing to look at when looking for a school but seem to cause the most comments at open days......

I prefer good pass rates, good pastoral care and encouraging girls to do the sciences at A level... if that means my girls get a lift there in the rain, because there is nowhere to store a wet coat, I'll live with that.

Are you in the UK wobbly? 6,000 pupils!!

This is true madeof In the scheme of things, lockers are low down on the list. Although I do wonder about children's backs in later life. Surely long-term back problems are more of an issue than good exam results? Perhaps schools should be doing more to prevent children lugging around such heavy loads...

A lot of our private school pupils take the train, but they are still driven to the station from a wide rural area, with no public buses.

I do get really fed up of people who won't accept that there are whole chunks of the country where public transport is an absolute joke.

Three mile walk or cycle (only possible if you have a friend to leave your bike with) on very narrow, quite busy and dangerous roads. To get to a bus stop with very infrequent services.

DontmindifIdo not all SAHMs have cars. Many have sacrificed a second car in order to save money to make up for losing their income.

Starballbunny, I went to school in a big city (don't want to out myself) so it's not just out of town where public transport is a joke.

I liked cycling as a teen and in reasonable weather I'd have enjoyed the trip to the bus stop.

Today you can't do it, the bridge is under water, this is not an infrequent problem. The rest of the lane is so wet, you couldn't cycle it without a full change of clothes, even though the sun is out.

Faith that is true. As another poster mentioned town buses tend all to go into the centre. My university digs to my best mates diggs, without a car would have been interesting. A lot of how we became and still 25 years after leaving are still friends is I used to take her home after evening events as there was no night bus out there.