There’s a long flight of steps on our school run. Eighty-five, to be precise. We first walked them with our eldest child, Betsy, in September 2006. Fast forward a hectic decade and Betsy is now in year 10, knee-deep in the onset of GCSEs, while her brother, Frank, is only a year behind at their secondary school.
In the intervening years, we’ve traipsed up and down these steps thousands of times, including the countless occasions the children have forgotten their lunch/PE kit/homework and we’ve had to run round with it to save the day. But now we’re left with nine-year-old Cissy, a determined year 5 girl who wants to throw off the stifling shackles of parental protection and walk on her own. No more steps, no more school run.
It’s a big decision (for us, not her) but it’s been on the cards for a while. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, Cissy would offer up one of those precious, all-enveloping hugs as we dropped her off at the school gates. Now all we tend to get is a slight upward thrust of her head so we can kiss her goodbye (if we must). It’s a sure sign she just doesn’t want or need us there.
It’s the end of the school run as we know it and, as the least sociable person in the school yard (and some would argue the south-east), I feel fine. Yes, I’m that blink-and-you’ll-miss-me-dad at drop-off and the one who stands alone in the corner of the playground pretending to be on his phone until the bell rings at pick-up. For me, the school run is an inconvenience and as I’ve long since exhausted everything I have to say in the playground, so Cissy’s determination to go it alone couldn’t have come at a better time. Besides, I don’t recognise many of the parents any more. They’re young, for a start.
But if I’m OK with Cissy walking to school, my wife, Ann, is still clinging on to the hope that she may just change her mind, at least for another year or 10. Deep down, she knows she’ll be just fine but it’s the very fact that she is our youngest child and that the end of the school run really does mean the end this time. Ann’s already broached the idea of following her up the road, hiding behind parked cars, to see if she’s OK. I think electronic tags may also have been mentioned, as were drones.
So what’s the problem?
Well, it’s not the route, which is only about a quarter of a mile at most. There are no main roads to cross and there’s usually a lollipop man or woman guiding the kids across the street directly outside her school. Nor is it the threat of stranger-danger, not least because we’ve walked the same route for the past decade and concluded that if there is danger lurking around every corner – all two of them – then it’s taking an inordinately long time for it to reveal itself.
According to research by YouGov, most Britons feel that at 10 a child is old enough to walk to school unaccompanied by an adult. Legally, however, there is no minimum age at which children can go it alone. The Walk to School campaign, for example, places the onus on parents to carry out a risk assessment of their route to school and judge whether their child has the maturity and confidence to successfully negotiate the journey.
When we began discussing Cissy walking to school on her own, we tried to recall precisely when it was that we both began doing it. For me, it was at the age of seven. I was the only English kid in a class in a less than salubrious suburb of Edinburgh and those walks home were always eventful, often threatening and very occasionally violent. Ann was also walking to school by that age, but she was, and still is, considerably tougher than me. Later, when my family moved back to Greater Manchester, I even walked along a train track to take a short cut to school. As far as I’m aware there are no railway lines on Cissy’s school run (and if there are then our risk assessment procedures need revisiting).
Yet fewer children are walking to school now than ever and those who do in our area tend to do so later than ever. In 2013, a study by the University of Westminster found that only 25% of primary school children in England now travel home from school independently, compared with 86% in 1971 and 35% in 1990. And while safety remains the paramount concern of all parents, the experience of Germany, where 76% of children still go it alone, suggests that the UK is lagging behind in terms of giving children at least some semblance of independence.At the same time that the number of children walking to and from school without their parents has plummeted, so the use of cars to drive children to school has increased to the point where, according to the charity Sustrans, one in five cars on the road during peak hours are now doing the school run. This despite the average primary school journey being just 1.5 miles.
While that’s never been an issue for us – we’ve always walked to school – there’s also evidence to suggest that not walking to school could even affect a child’s academic progress, too. In 2012, a Danish study – the Mass Experiment 2012 – surveyed 20,000 Danish schoolchildren aged between five and 19, and set them concentration tests. It found that those children who took the bus or the train, or who were driven to school, performed poorer in the tests than those children who had walked or cycled to school, with the positive impact on concentration levels lasting for up to four hours.
The fact that Cissy has already been walking the route she’ll be taking to school for over four years does allay most of our fears. The local environment is familiar, she recognises the pitfalls and, crucially, she knows most of the other people who walk it, too. Besides, she has grown up alongside an older brother and sister and she’s already more streetwise than they were at her age. In fact, the only thing that’s likely to delay or prevent her getting to school on time is the endless chattering with her friends or stopping every few yards to stroke another neighbourhood cat.
I guess we’ve never been the kind of fashionable free-range parents who let their children find their own way, learning about the many dangers of the modern world by leaving them alone in a hotel room while we drink and dance the night away but, equally, we’re not the kind who want, or need, our kids to be within earshot at all times. It’s a difficult balance to strike, but it has to be done.
Put simply, it really is time to unwrap the cotton wool.
It’s time to let go.
