Data on how children are making their school run journeys is hard to find - what are the sustainable travel rates for any given school or ward? How does that compare to other areas? How does it compare to a London average? What even is the London average? The school run is a complex problem made by multiple different family types with multiple sets of needs on any given day. Better data will enable us to better understand it and better impact school run modal shift. This will in turn help to reduce reduce peak time congestion and all it's extremely damaging health and economic impacts.
So we've spent some time analysing the National Travel Survey [NTS] for London pupils to get a better understanding of how pupils are travelling to school across age groups and distance bands. An outline of our findings from the NTS is below. This information informed our school travel dashboard which models primary pupil travel for schools, wards and boroughs throughout London.
For the last 5 years, school run driving rates for 5-16 year olds in London have been between 20% and 24%
The National Travel Survey table [NTS 0614] provides a blended overall driving rate for London pupils 5-16. This shows 23% of pupil trips driven in 2015/16 , reducing to 20% in 2018/2019 and increasing back to 24% for 2022.
However, to be able to take action on reducing school run driving and enabling pupils to travel sustainably, we need to understand this data in more depth.
In order to dissect the data in more depth, we combined years to make sure we had a sufficiently large sample size. We combined years 2017-2019 and 2022, and analysed the differences between primary and secondary age travel. 2020 and 2021 were omitted due to the impact of covid.
Combining years 2017-2019 and 2022 the NTS shows an overall driving rate of 20.5% for pupils age 5-16.
This is based on 8,152 trips made for the purposes of 'education', by 799 children aged 5-16 and living in London.
So the next questions we wanted to answer once we had a sufficient sample size was what age groups are being driven? How does the distance that pupils are being driven impact travel mode? Understanding at least these questions can enable us to focus on the areas and solutions that will have the most impact on modal shift.
For primary pupils age 5-11, 28% of pupils' trips were reported as driven and this breaks out in the following way across travel distances.
Participant recorded on the road distance | % of pupils' trips | % of trips driven |
<0.5 miles | 32.4% | 2.0% |
0.5 to 0.9 miles | 31.6% | 12.9% |
1-1.9 miles | 21.6% | 64.9% |
2-4.9 miles | 10.7% | 66.7% |
5+ miles | 3.8% | 58.0% |
All trips | 100% | 28.1% |
This data clearly shows us that as pupil distance from school increases, the propensity for children to be driven increases dramatically. This could be for many reasons, from adults accompanying children having to make onward journeys to work, to the route not feeling safe for cycling.
The next question when looking at these distance trends is how many pupils are travelling these longer distance ranges? We can see from the data table above that 64% of pupils travel under 1 mile to school and therefore 36% travel over 1 mile. Our data model (which looks at individual school catchments) estimates this as slightly less, at 30% of pupils travelling over 1 mile to school, but this is still a huge number. This equates to 240,000 primary pupils travelling over 1 mile to school and at a driving rate of 65%+ in this range, this means that the majority of trips driven to primary school [150,000 out of 200,000] are trip lengths of over 1 mile.
In fact, we can sum it up by saying that an estimated 600,000 primary pupils are travelling sustainably to school but their journeys are endangered by car trips taking the remaining 200,000 to school. 150,000 of these 200,000 journeys are over 1 mile travel distance.
We think that this means we need an integrated approach to school run travel, with more convenient choices for parents with longer school runs, from cargo bikes, to better public transport, and even staffed "drop off" walking or cycling groups that parents do not need to join.
For secondary age pupils 11-16, 10.9% of pupils' trips are recorded as being driven.
This is significantly less than primary pupils because secondary age school pupils are able to travel independently and so are not reliant on their parents taking them to school. The driving rates for secondary age pupils across distance bands break out in the following way across travel distance.
Participant recorded on the road distance | % of pupils trips | % of trips driven |
<0.5 miles | 13.8% | 0.9% |
0.5 to 0.9 miles | 19.1% | 4.3% |
1-1.9 miles | 20.0% | 12.7% |
2-4.9 miles | 29.1% | 14.8% |
5+ miles | 17.9% | 17.5% |
All trips | 100% | 10.9% |
Again, this shows us that as distance from school increases, so the propensity for a secondary age pupil to be driven increases. There are again, many reasons for this from concerns about the personal safety of the pupil travelling on their own, particularly in winter when afternoons get darker, to the roads not being safe enough for that child to cycle independently.
What are the factors that concern you about your child's journey to school? We'd love to hear from parents about their school travel. Please get in touch with us at hello@solvetheschoolrun.org
Footnotes:
Data Advisor: Anna Goodman, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine & data lead for Department for Transport recommended Propensity to Cycle tool.
To calculate this primary age table we used National Travel Survey data from 2017-2019 plus 2022[1], 2020 and 2021 data was omitted due to impact of covid. Data comes from 4,593 trips made for the purpose of 'education', by 435 children aged 5-10 and living in London . They survey weights provided by the National Travel Survey were applied.
To calculate this secondary age table we gain used the NTS data from 2017-2019 plus 2022[1], 2020 and 2021 data was omitted due to impact of covid. Data comes from 3,559 trips made for the purpose of 'education' by 364 children aged 11-16 and living in London. The survey weights provided by the National Travel Survey were applied.
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