School commute

[TheSunIsStillShining]

HI,

What do you think is a realistic expectation for a secondary school kid (16) to commute. School starts at 8.30, finishes 4.30.

Both H and me had a max 20m walk to all our schools, our friends never did more than 30m, but this was in diff country/city.

Son says max 20m. But that leaves us within a circle of very high rent area (so no point moving) and we want to move to a lower rent area, but they are about an hour or a bit more away.

At the moment we live 8m walk from his school. so that doesn't help the argument.

Some clarification:

• we are not letting our kid govern our lives, but it has to be good for all 3 of us
• we both wfh FT, so that is not an aspect to be considered
• we want to find a compromise that works for us, but am interested to hear how much other ppl's kids travel
• we offered the option for him to use my small moped, but he flat out refused. Car is out of the question.

DD does 90 minutes each way.

School is an 'outstanding' comp that heavily specialises in her specific area of interest and she's on a scholarship for that.

School is in London and DD has classes after school that are all in London so makes that easy. School also lottery entry so no issues with everyone else living locally - they're all massively spread out.

The nearest schools to where we live would have been either 45 minutes (for the 'needs improvement' comp) or over an hour on a bus to the second nearest.

Her commute is 2 trains, first one is almost an hour - she's guaranteed a seat and they have wifi. Switches platforms for second (no tube or anything) and then a 3 minute walk to school.

She has been commuting since Y1 of Primary, so very used to it. She gets all her homework done on the train, so evenings are free once she gets home, or she just watches Netflix.

IME, it's far worse if the commute has lots of changes, or you can't do anything else at the same time.

Also important to have options - DD stays late 2 nights a week for after-school clubs and just gets a later train. At one of our more local options, if she didn't get the one school bus after school then she wouldn't be able to get home without a really tricky commute and that would massively limit being able to take part in sports, music, drama etc

Wow, that is a lot of commute time....
But I agree that probs a seat + wifi for an hour of that makes up for it.
I used to do 50mins for 6 months on a similar train and the amount of work I could do was amazing.

Hell be commuting to work in a few years, and then he’ll know what a pain in the arse it is. Especially when there’s train/tube/bus strikes unless he thinks he’ll be on the property ladder with his earnings