With the new school term under way, STEPHEN LEWIS looks for solutions to the traffic chaos that is the school run.

IT'S just before 3pm on Monday and the playground at the back of Westfield Community Primary School in Acomb is filling up with parents waiting to collect their children. In a scene being repeated at schools up and down the country, more parents are in the cars lining the road behind the school.

Claire Crake is sitting with her fellow mums Tracy Arthur and Kelly Grimbley at a small picnic table in the playground. She lives just around the corner but she has driven to school to pick up her two children, Bethany, eight, and Bradley, six.

"I shouldn't have really," she says. "I do walk sometimes. But if I have been shopping or something I just come straight to school in the car."

Claire at least shares the duty of picking up her children with a friend and neighbour; and she is typical of parents battling to balance a busy life with the demands of the school run. She works part time so if she's running late, she feels she has to use the car. She wouldn't dream of allowing her children to walk on their own. "There are too many weirdoes and idiots about. I would be worried sick," she says.

The consequence of busy lives and fears about children's safety is that during the school run, roads become clogged with cars. Claire admits that unless she arrives early, it is impossible to find anywhere to park.

That's at Westfield - a school where, if anything, the congestion problems are less severe than at many schools because children of different ages start and finish at different times, as much as 15 minutes apart.

That's not because of trying to find a solution for the morning and afternoon rush, admits headteacher Mark Barnett. With major building works at the school, he doesn't want 700-plus children all arriving and leaving at the same time. But the knock-on effect is that the traffic problems, at Westfield at least, don't seem so bad.

The Government is sufficiently concerned by the daily gridlock caused by the school run to have suggested that more schools could be allowed to stagger start times, so that children can be picked up at different times.

It seems a sensible enough suggestion, although the Government appeared this week to be backtracking a little, with a spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills insisting the Government was considering a range of ways of persuading parents to abandon the school run, of which staggered starting times may or may not be one.

One obvious objection to the idea is that if children start and finish lessons at different times, parents may spend a lot of time waiting. Claire admits that already at Westfield she ends up waiting for around 20 minutes for both her children to come out of school. If start and finish times at other schools were staggered even more, such waits could become even longer.

This is not the only problem. One suggestion last week was that some schools could start lessons as early as 8am, leaving less of a clash between the school run and the early-morning work rush hour.

That, in effect, would be similar to what happens at York's Canon Lee School since headteacher Kevin Deadman introduced earlier Continental hours a year ago, with pupils now beginning at 8.30am and finishing at 2.40pm.

Again, Mr Deadman says, the new hours weren't intended to reduce traffic congestion, more as a way of extending the time left for children at the end of the school day. They have certainly worked in that respect, he says - and one knock-on effect has been that parents dropping off children at Canon Lee arrive a little earlier than at other schools. Precisely the effect hoped for from the staggered starting-time suggestion.

Mr Deadman suggests that if older children finish a bit earlier, they could even help to pick up younger siblings after school. But Tracy Arthur, who has a son, Reece, six, at Westfield, and a daughter, Siobhan, 11, at Oaklands, says older children finishing school earlier will bring new problems.

"If schools are starting earlier and earlier, that means giving your daughter a key to let herself in if you're at home," she says. So more children could be left at home unsupervised if the earlier finishing times don't fit in with work patterns.

Most people agree something needs to be done, however. Councillor Steve Galloway, the Liberal Democrat leader of City of York Council, says that comparing the congestion during school term time with that during the school holidays proves how much the school run contributes to traffic gridlock.

"Most people in York will say that during the school holidays there are markedly fewer traffic problems," he says.

Staggered school hours is worth looking at, he says. But the council is also about to consult residents on a number of other measures designed to end school-run congestion, as part of a transport plan expected to be produced next year.

The emphasis will be on reducing the number of parents who drive children to school - and the council looks likely to adopt a 'carrot and stick' approach. The carrot will involve making parents feel better about letting children walk to school, by organising "walking buses" and the like.

"But there will also be the alternative approach, which will be that parking restrictions close to schools are likely to be instituted to make it less worthwhile for people who drive short distances to school," Coun Galloway says.

Councillor Carol Runciman, the Liberal Democrats' executive member for education on the city council, has a grown-up daughter and remembers being a working mum herself. She understands parents' worries about their children's safety.

She agrees with Coun Galloway, however, about the need to encourage parents to let children walk or cycle to school. That would not only be good for York's roads, but also benefit children's health, she points out.

She is encouraged by what happened during the bus strike last week. The council put a lot of effort into informing parents about alternative ways of getting to school, she says - and the result was there did not seem to have been an increase in the number of parents driving children to school, as could have been the case.

She, too, thinks there may be benefit in staggered starting times, so long as they don't cause too many problems for parents. But the real solution, she says, lies with getting more children to cycle or walk to school - which requires more schemes such as walking buses.

She is a big fan of such simple innovations.

"Every parent these days is being torn between their child being safe, which means going in the car with mum and dad, and the child being healthy, which means walking," she says. "They may well feel there are security issues if the children are walking too far. That's why walking buses are invaluable."

Updated: 11:54 Tuesday, September 09, 2003