The School Run

There have been problems with parking near to the Wantage Church of England Primary School (pictured above) in Newbury Street and these have just been highlighted in the local press (see here).  This, however, is not a problem unique to Wantage and I suspect that many Oxfordshire councillors get complaints about parking issues and enforcement (which are often really a police matter). A similar situation arises at North Drive in Grove where the Church of England Primary School is located. As the photo below shows, there is only a very narrow residential road near to the entrance to the school and, recently, the congestion in the area has been made worse by the ongoing pipe replacement works of Southern Gas.

In the Wantage case, there are at least some nearby car parks (Civic Hall and Memorial Park) which parents can use, but this is not a possibility in Grove where there is only street parking available.

One of the factors that has made things worse in recent years has been the closure of school sites, which means that the remaining schools have had to expand to take even more children. The Garston Lane School site was sold for redevelopment and the Church Street CE Infants School was integrated with the Junior School in Newbury Street (both shown below).

I believe there is also a planning issue. Schools are often located in residential areas where housing and development has been allowed to encroach close to their boundaries making it very difficult to deal with any increases in traffic. Also, sometimes the opposite has happened - a school built in earlier times has expanded beyond what the local area can reasonably accommodate in terms of traffic.

Millbrook Primary School (shown below) in Grove is a good example of where car parking has been designed into the campus. Even here, space can sometimes be at a premium on a busy day, but at least the problem has been addressed. 

I do hope that future developments (e.g. Grove Airfield) take on these issues and ensure that new schools are not only designed with sufficient parking/drop-off facilities, but that an adequate "buffer zone" is kept around premises to provide for future expansion. All too often we just  hear the claim that "we want to discourage people using cars for the school trip". Fine, but how do you actually do this?

I would be very interested to hear the opinions of local residents on this topic.