“‘Surely the Time Has come to Abolish that Barbaric Twice-Daily Ritual?’: A (Very) Brief History of the British School Run”

Elsa Devienne (27 October 2024)

Picking a school might be the most significant decision parents will ever make. You think I’m talking about Ofsted ratings or whether to go public or private? Think again. The most impactful school decision has arguably to do with location and the means of transport used to get there. Let’s put it this way: parents will do the journey to and from school 2,660 times over the course of their child’s primary school years (and that’s without counting additional trips for school plays and siblings). If you hate your journey to school, this will have a big impact on your life.

If you choose to drive, you will join almost half of British children and their parents (45% as of 2023) who go behind the wheel and, according to most evidence, you will hate it. This isn’t a new phenomenon. The school run (that is driving your child to and from school) has been reviled by the British population of frazzled parents and their kids for a long time (not that it’s loved any better on the other side of the Atlantic). In 1993, journalist Margot Norman was already wondering in the columns of The Times why parents and children were enduring that ‘deadly crawl through clouds of poisonous gas.’ ‘Surely,’ she reflected, ‘the time has come to abolish that barbaric twice-daily ritual?’

Far from abolishing it, British parents have doubled and trebled down on it. The figures speak for themselves. While 74% of primary age children walked to school in 1975-1976, only 54% did twenty years later and the decline has continued steadily since (although there is reason for hope with the 2022 National Travel Survey showing a slight reversal of the trend). 

The frantic school run has become such an iconic parenting experience that, in typical British fashion, it has provided plenty of joke fodder in the press and on TV, including most recently for the writers of acclaimed TV-show Motherland. In the first scene of the pilot, aired in 2016, Julia, the perpetually stressed-out working mother of two, flouts traffic rules to get to school on time. As a show created on the premise of “relatability,” that is on the idea that parents would see their worst traits reflected at them, the choice to start the series with a delinquent school run was giving British parents who drive to school a pass: ‘This is how it is, isn’t it?’ was the subtext behind that scene.

Julia (played by Anna Maxwell Martin) on her delinquent school-run in the Motherland pilot. © BBC. Included under fair use.

So how did we get there? Why has the school run become a hallmark of British everyday life?

Part of the answer to these questions has to do with the rapid rise of car ownership and the transformation of the built environment that cemented car dominance in the post-war period. Other explanations often mentioned are the decline of children’s independent mobility (partially due to fears of ‘stranger danger’ even though traffic accidents have always been more likely than child kidnapping), women’s increased participation in the workforce, longer commutes linked to rising housing prices, changing patterns of work and the advent of parental choice in education.

But these factors don’t explain the cultural power of the school run. They don’t explain the so-called ‘Chelsea tractors’, the ‘Volvo culture’ and the ‘yummy mummies,’ that is the performance of class and motherhood at the school gates. Nor do they explain why we allow a situation where children breathe illegal levels of pollution every morning or why incentivizing walking to school has become part of the British culture wars. In other words, what is it about the school run that makes it so difficult to solve when we know how bad it is for us? How did the school run become political?

My answer is that parents are not just constrained by infrastructure, but also by the stories that circulate in the media and popular culture around school and parenting. In recent decades, automobile manufacturers, advertisers, journalists and commentators have used the school run as an opportunity to reinforce car dominance, sanction certain parenthood choices, and erase walking parents and their children. It is high time we reinvent the school run outside of these constraining narratives.

The Origins of that Most Hated Ritual 

When did our concern with the school run emerge? With only 15% of children concerned in the mid-1970s, the school run did not initially attract much attention. In fact, the expression did not appear in the press until 1988 when The Times reported on the gruelling schedule of a mother of two who drove 52 miles a day to deliver her children to different (private) schools.

By the mid-1990s, the school run had become a more common experience across the social spectrum and had, according to one journalist, entered ‘our national mythology.’ While many factors propelled this growing army of driving parents, car manufacturers shouldered some of the blame. They successfully touted the four-wheeler as the vehicle of choice for the school run, with one journalist commenting that car makers had ‘elevated [the school run] to a “lifestyle experience.”’ Well-placed automobile promotions and ads cemented the idea that driving to school was the normal, rational mode of transport for the job. In 1996, for instance, The Times offered a Jeep Cherokee as its main prize for a ‘Back to school’ competition.

Yet concern about rush hour traffic was rising. Reports and surveys denounced the health impacts of air pollution, the rising number of traffic children casualties and the ‘loss of children’s freedom’ due to car dominance. Margot Roman’s rant in The Times was part of that awareness: ‘Why do we endure fumes that turn cities into hell-holes?’ she asked. Around the same time, the Environmental Transport Association organised the first ‘Walk to School Week’ and Sustrans led its ‘Safe Routes to Schools’ initiative. By the late 1990s, there was a growing consensus among Labour politicians that something had to be done to reverse the trend. Driving had already been firmly associated with the Conservative party since at least the Thatcher era when the Iron Lady had doubled the state’s road building budget. But children’s means of transport to school had remained mostly neutral territory. New Labour’s victory in 1997 heralded a new era for the school run. The most evident sign that the school run had become political was the media scrutiny surrounding newly-elected Prime Minister Tony Blair’s choice of school for his daughter: traffic and distance, according to one headline, was ‘key’ to the Blairs’ decision.

War on the School Run?

The new Labour government meant business. In July 1998, it published a White Paper promising a “new deal for transport” which included the commitment to reduce the number of school journeys by car to mid-1980s levels (thus cutting it by one third) by introducing school green transport plans, ‘safe routes’ to schools, lollipop patrols (crossing guards in US English), bike sheds, new congestion and parking charges, and more. The goal was to tackle climate change, alleviate the economic and health costs of congestion, but also ‘increase personal choice.’ Minister of Transport John Prescott, who knew he risked being demonized by the right-leaning press as a car-hating eco-warrior, described himself as a driver (he, in fact, owned two jaguars which earned him the moniker ‘Two-Jags’) and embraced this message of increased choice to cut the grass under freedom-loving Tories’ feet. Alas, the backlash came anyway.

Prescott and the government were almost immediately accused of waging a ‘war on the school run’ which was hurting first and foremost mothers. Women, who had been mercilessly mocked in the press as inept drivers throughout the 1980s and 1990s, were now being held up by Tories, the driving lobby and journalists as the victims of Prescott’s ‘farcical’ policies. A typical example is when Theresa May, then Tory education spokeswoman, was quoted by The Sun pleading for mothers who, when choosing to drive, were ‘merely safeguarding children.’ Little did it matter that driving was what endangered children’s health and safety to begin with. The language of security proved a powerful cultural and emotional motivator in refusing change. Nonetheless, the Labour government pursued its efforts, publishing a new report in 2000 calling for cheaper child bus fares and more child-friendly bus services.

Meanwhile, car manufacturers were continuing their strategy of normalising off-roaders for the school run. In 1999, Land Rover released an ad for its Freelander model inspired by the 1966 movie Born Free about a lioness born in captivity and released into the wild. By showing the car being ‘released’ into the wild as if it were a dangerous animal, the car manufacturer humorously acknowledged that the off-roader was never meant for the city. In fact, the ad made the very wildness and dangerousness of the car its asset, giving mothers the reassurance that they’d be seen as predators in the urban jungle.

“The city is no place for them”: a Land Rover is being “returned to the wild” in this 1999 TV advert.

Mode of transport to school (excluding bus, cycling and other less common forms of transport) for 5- to 10-year-old British children from 1975-76 to 2022. All figures from National Travel Surveys (Department of Transport).

Where are the Walking Parents and Children?

By its own measure (cutting the school run by one third), the Blair government failed. To be fair, it probably slowed down the trend. The Labour policies failed because they weren’t bold enough, but also because changing the narratives and representations surrounding transport to school and parenting proved hard. While driving fathers were portrayed as being ‘daddy cool’ (as per the 2001 Vauxhall advert) and ‘Land Rover mums’ as protective of their brood, walking parents and children were usually absent from discourses. And when they were mentioned, it was usually to be ridiculed, as in the case of the ‘walking bus’ initiative launched by Prescott which was relentlessly mocked by the right-wing press as amounting to nothing more than another ‘Ministry of Silly Walks’ a la Monty Pythons. As demonstrated in a study conducted in 2014, the fact that walking has been viewed as ‘abnormal’ in Britain represents a major obstacle to increasing levels of walking. The construction of abnormality starts with the school run when young children are forming habits. But it is reinforced by the media, advertising and popular culture. Advertisers have no incentive to show us how terrible driving to school is for our health. And they certainly won’t ever show how much fun walking, scooting or hop-scotching to school is. So what do we do?  

Since the so-called ‘active travel’ renaissance that followed the COVID-19 lockdowns, there have been more walking (and cycling) parents and children in the media and public discourses. This is largely down to the creative campaigning led by pro-walking groups (including by established charities such as Living Streets but also new ones like Mums for Lungs and Solve The School Run). Photographs of Ella Kissi-Debrah, a London girl aged nine who often walked to school along heavily polluted roads, have widely circulated in the media since she died after an asthma attack in 2013. Thanks to her family’s relentless campaigning, Ella was the first person to have toxic air given as her cause of death. Having her story and her face in the media sends an important message: some families (often those from low-income and BIPOC communities) pay an unfathomable price for other families’ school-run choices.

Mums For Lungs, a campaigning group founded in 2017, champions school streets as one solution to tackle air pollution (see mumsforlungs.org)

Ella Kissi-Debrah died at the age of 9 years old of an asthma attack. By circulating her photographs in the media, her family gave a human face to air pollution and its tragic consequences © Ella Roberta Estate

Infrastructure is key to changing people’s habits, but so are representations and discourses. As a cultural historian, I see the recent rise in visuals and stories of walking and cycling families as extremely positive. Walking to school used to be the norm. These new narratives and images are an important step in re-creating this sense of ‘normality’ and pathologizing the fossil-powered, cancer-causing, miserable school run.

Elsa Devienne is Assistant Professor of History at Northumbria University in the UK where she teaches environmental history, US history and American Studies. Her first book, Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, was published by Oxford University Press in May 2024. In 2021, the French version of the book won the Willi Paul Adams Award given by the Organization of American Historians and was a finalist of the Prix de la Recherche SAES/AFEA. Her research has been profiled in numerous news and culture outlets, including Time Magazine and the BBC.

This piece was initially presented at a workshop held by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter (hybrid) on 4-5 July 2024. It was supported by Wellcome Trust Centre Grant [203109/Z/16/Z] and explored “Everyday Mobilities: Social, Cultural, and Environmental Perspectives on Getting Around.” (You can see event recordings here - day 1; day 2.). In recent years, daily travel - especially in urban spaces - has been increasingly politicised. Concerns about the climate emergency, air pollution, and inequities of health and risk exposures have shifted discussions about everyday mobility, simultaneously producing new policy thinking, planning experiments, activist movements, and public backlash. This workshop explored these developments, examining the social relations, cultural frames, and environmental concerns with which everyday travel has become entangled in different local, national, and transnational contexts, as well as attending to the varied histories and possible futures of "getting around”. The "Everyday Mobilities” series on M&M is a first step towards the establishment of an Everyday Mobilities interdisciplinary network bringing together scholars, practitioners and campaigners.