Road traffic accidents are, tragically, the leading cause of death for children in the UK. And The Royal Society for Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA) estimates that every month 1,200 children are injured in traffic related collisions that happen within 500 metres of a school.
These two statistics hit me hard when I first read them. And I can imagine that they hit you just as hard. Parents first told me about their concerns dropping kids off and collecting them again after school, then so did the schools, and then finally so did the children themselves.
When I looked at the data, I could see it was telling me the same story – 14% of child fatalities occur during the morning school run between 7 and 9 o’clock, and 23% happen after school between 3 and 5 o’clock.
In February this year, a young boy in Trimley St Martin was hit by a van outside his school at pick up time. The driver wasn’t speeding or driving recklessly — we think they were travelling at just 20 miles an hour — but the impact was so severe that the primary school child spent three days in hospital with a broken hip, and many months recovering.
The incident reminds us that improving road safety around our schools isn’t just about reducing speeds to 20mph (though I don’t dare imagine how much worse the accident could have been if the driver was traveling at 30mph or 40mph).
Proper crossings, better road markings and improved signage, and of course lollypop men and women could all have helped in this case.
But the biggest frustration in this story is that I was told by the County Council that the road had been assessed – after the accident and because of the accident – but it did not meet the criteria for additional safety measures. You don’t need me to tell you that’s not good enough.
Bucklesham Primary School knows this all too well. They have been pleading for years to improve safety around their school – which is nestled in the corner of a 60mph and a 30mph road. But despite 20 years of campaigning, they’ve had no safety measures put in place.
These stories, and many others I’ve heard since I was elected, are why I’ve been campaigning on improving road safety around our schools, bringing the campaign to Parliament with a petition to Number 10 Downing Street, and now with a Ten-Minute Rule Bill in Parliament that I’m delivering today.
And it’s why I’m leading a national campaign to improve road safety around our schools, to make it a requirement for local authorities to take action to improve road safety outside schools – where and when it is needed.
I want to see it become mandatory for Local Authorities to work with schools to explore options to improve road safety standards at each of the schools who request it.
The solutions, of course, must be led by the issues locally – and a package of measures could include more double yellow lines around schools, better controls on parking, better signage, or perhaps school crossings, lollipop patrols, or reduced speed zones – whatever is needed in that area to improve safety and save lives. Schools shouldn’t have to beg for better safety, they should be able to expect it.
The Government is set to publish a Road Safety Strategy in the coming months – this will be the first strategy in a decade and will be a huge step forward in tackling a whole range of road safety problems. I am working to make sure that road safety around schools is a top priority within this strategy.
For me it’s pretty simple; we know what can make our roads safer and more often than not its simple to implement – but we have to have the County Council on board, and be accountable to challenge from our schools and communities. We need a sense of urgency, and we need to make sure that schools like Bucklesham Primary School aren’t campaigning for over 20 years, just to see speed limits cut from 60mph.
We shouldn’t have to campaign for change on this, but for as long as we must – I’ll be fighting to make sure that our roads are safer.
This column has been written by Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, MP for Suffolk Coastal.
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