THE first time I experienced the local school run, I couldn't believe it. I encountered it at the home-time collection. Cars were everywhere. Overflowing from a purpose-built layby, the parked vehicles reduced the road to single-file for a quarter of a mile. There was much weaving in and out and backing up, while uncollected kids spilled hazardously across the highway.

The situation was so chaotic that when I got home I said to my wife: "Get in the car. You've got to see the traffic at the school. Utter mayhem." "Oh," she replied calmly, "I often get mixed up in it. It's absolutely crazy."

A generation ago, our own three kids attended the same school. The only cars that picked kids up were three or four from outlying farms. Only when it was teeming down did we collect our kids. I remember doing it twice.

Now, the school run nationwide is a source of such congestion and danger that the Government intends spending £50m to try and curb it. There will be designated walking routes, walking buses, staggered starts, cycle racks. Conspicuous by its absence is the most effective solution. Restoring the exclusive link with their neighbourhoods that was formerly taken for granted with local schools.

Of course allowing admissions from a wider area is part of the mantra of 'personal choice'. Classic Thatcherism by its author, this still holds sway over the wider social good. Which is why no-one, but no-one, dares suggest making local schools local again.

The school run might be tolerable if its sole mainspring was education. But snobbery plays a large part. A year or two back, the primary school in a large village near mine, Hutton Rudby, was ranked the best in North Yorkshire. But some parents still preferred school-running their kids to the village school at nearby Swainby.

There might be one or two rougher kids at Hutton Rudby. And perhaps also in the market town of Stokesley, which provides school-run pupils in my village. I give thanks I learned to live with the 'rougher element' at Normanby County Primary School, Teesside. And, hey, probably I was the rougher element to some.

Recently there was a money-raising effort in my village to help fund a new classroom. Naively supposing it was needed to cope with village expansion I stumped up gladly. But the extra room was mainly to accommodate school-run kids. My hand stays in my pocket in future.

Of course the freedom to send kids anywhere might be justified if there was no alternative to the local school. But private education is still there (alas). And that access to it depends on cash does not make it very different from the school run, which offers choice only to those with cars.

The Government's initiatives look unlikely to make much impact. Meanwhile the very worst aspect of the school run is that it deters parents who would prefer their kids to walk from letting them do so. Getting knocked down in the kind of traffic mayhem I witnessed would be all too easy. No parent looking at his or her dead or injured child would draw comfort from the thought that he or she died, or was maimed, upholding its parents' principles.

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