It’s that time of year again – the nights are drawing in, the dreaded C-word is on the distant horizon and the kids are back in full-time education. And that means the stressful school run is once more part of your daily motoring landscape.
Here, then, are some of our top tips to take the sting out of those hectic drop-offs and pick-ups at the school gates.
Time is the great leveller
It’s possibly the most obvious piece of advice we can give, but fail to prepare, prepare to fail – and by ‘prepare’ here, we mean give yourself more time than you need. When the roads are empty, you might well be able to do the five kilometres from your driveway to the school gates in six minutes, but if you try the same thing when every other parent in a car in the local vicinity is also en route to the school, then you have to accept it might take you twice as long – or more – to get to the school.
Therefore, it might be a pain trying to drag the kids out of bed with an even earlier alarm call, but another 15-20 minutes of added time in the mornings could be all the difference between taking on the school run calmly, or doing it in a heightened state of anxiety about whether you’re going to make it on time.
Seek alternative forms of transport
For a website called Carzone to be adding in a tip about abandoning the car itself in a piece about taking on the school run might seem odd, but sometimes we are too dependent on our vehicles. If you live close enough to the school itself, walking the kids in (or even cycling, if you prefer) will be cheaper, not much longer than taking the car (considering how slow moving school-run traffic can really be) and should see you avoiding all the on-the-road boiling points.
Park further away
It’s all too tempting, especially if you’ve ignored our first pointer above, to try and get your car as close to the school gates as you can and then park it wherever. This is a high-tariff move anyway, because you’re right in the thick of the traffic and pedestrian action when you’re closer to school, raising your stress levels yet higher, but it can also see some less-than-considerate parents dumping their cars in places where they shouldn’t be – blocking driveways, sitting on double-yellow lines, situated too close to pedestrian crossings and so on. A straightforward way to avoid this scenario is to park a little further away. It might mean you walking for the last section of the school run, but isn’t that better than getting a ticket for double-parking right up near the school gates?
Drive slowly
This one might not take much stress out of the situation, especially if you’re running late because you failed to heed point one on this list but absolutely do not speed near the school. Admittedly, you shouldn’t speed in any urban areas anyway, yet when you’re near big crowds of children – who aren’t always the most ‘road-smart’ of pedestrians – then the rule is non-negotiable. Obviously, if you’re running behind schedule, it can be tempting to slightly up your speed to make up the lost time… don’t.
Consider lift sharing
There’s a good chance that you live near other driving parents if you’re on the school run, so perhaps see if you can befriend them and come to an agreement where you split the school runs in a week between you – they take and pick up your kids one day, then you do the same for their children the next. You might add a small degree of stress to the days you’re driving, as you’ve got more kids to look after, but if you’re halving the amount of time you’re actually driving to and from the school in a week, the benefits should outweigh the drawbacks.
Just be late
You might have tried our all of our advice above, and yet you still find yourself in heavy traffic of a morning, tapping your fingers irritably on the steering wheel as you sit stationary a good ten minutes’ drive from the school with only five minutes to go before roll call. So, if that’s you, our final tip is: just let it happen. As long as you’re not coming in with you kids late every single day of the week, turning up a few minutes behind schedule and apologising to the class teacher is a lot better than either getting a ticket for speeding or parking badly near the school, and infinitely preferable to having an incident with another road user in the vicinity of the school gates.