Road danger at the school gate: reading collision data and making a School Street request

What the collision data is

Every road collision reported to the police in which someone was injured is published by the Department for Transport with its location, date, severity, the vehicles involved and the age band of each casualty. It goes back decades and is updated each year. It does not include collisions with no injury, or near misses, and it depends on the collision being reported, so it undercounts. What it records is consistent from year to year.

How to read it for a school

1. Draw the area that matters. The roads at the gate, the crossings pupils use, and the main walking and cycling routes for a few hundred metres in each direction. The safeguarding context report uses the school's grid reference from the Department for Education register as the centre.
2. Count by severity and by casualty type. Pedestrian and cyclist casualties are the ones that speak to the school run. Note any casualty in a child age band, without inferring who they were.
3. Look at time of day and school terms. A cluster between eight and nine in the morning on weekdays in term time is a school-run pattern. A cluster on Friday nights is not.
4. Name the locations. A junction, a crossing, a stretch of road outside a parade of shops. Recurring locations are what the highway authority can act on.
5. State the limits. Five years of data at one junction may be two collisions. Two is not a trend, and the report should say so.

What a School Street request needs

A School Street closes the road outside a school to motor traffic at drop-off and pick-up, usually with a camera or a barrier and exemptions for residents. The highway authority decides: in England the county, unitary or metropolitan borough council or the London borough, and in Wales the county or county borough council. Trunk roads are the exception: National Highways runs them in England and the Welsh Government in Wales, and in London Transport for London runs the red routes. Requests are stronger when they come with:

• The collision record for the road and its junctions, with the counts above and a map.
• A description of the road at drop-off and pick-up: parking, turning, pavement widths, sightlines, the crossing provision.
• Evidence of what the school already does: staggered times, walking buses, park-and-stride, and why they are not enough.
• Support from the governing board, from parents, and where possible from residents on the street, who will be asked.
• The specific ask: the road, the times, the term dates, and the exemptions the school would accept.

Many authorities run a School Streets programme with an application route; the request goes there. Where there is none, the ask goes to the highway authority's road safety team, and copying the local councillor helps.

Where it belongs in the safeguarding file

Keeping children safe in education says nothing about road danger, and the report sets it apart under ‘also around the school’. Governors often ask about it all the same, and the collision paragraph sits well in the governors' annual report, with the date of the data and the date of any request to the authority. The safeguarding context report includes the chapter and the paragraph, written for the roads around one school.