Solve the School Run is a charity working to reduce school run traffic in a bid to protect parents and children from harmful emissions. Nicola, who has been campaigning for better air quality in London over the last seven years, founded the charity with her friend Claire McDonald two years ago.
Before Solve the School Run you worked in data analytics for 15 years. What prompted you to become involved in air pollution?
When I gave birth to my first child I started worrying, like a lot of parents, about all the harmful emissions they could be exposed to. However, I didn’t become fully involved until I then had more children and started doing the school run.
Our local primary school is only around a 700 metre walk from where we live, and it is surrounded by congested cars. The school’s playground is also situated near two B roads and when I first arrived at the school to drop my children off, I remember thinking it was absolutely flanked by congested cars. The whole situation left me feeling really stressed about the walk to school because of the road dangers and air pollution risks.
The shock is what activated me to start campaigning for change locally and given my background, I realised quickly that data was going to be really essential if we were going to make a point to councillors and our cabinet office about why we need to change the school run for families.
Did you become aware of air quality problems when you started doing the school run, or were you aware beforehand?
When I fell pregnant the first time, I read a lot of articles about how air pollution can impact your unborn child, and I started to worry a little bit because my old office and where I lived was by a main road. We were based in Brixton, which was incredibly polluted.
During my maternity leave I met Jemima Hartshorn, who founded Mums for Lungs, and we would go for walks with our babies together and be so shocked about how polluted all the surrounding roads were.
However my concerns around air quality really grew during my second pregnancy. My daughter was born two months premature and after doing some research I discovered that there are correlations between air pollution and children being born early and low birth weight.
I experienced something called a placenta abruption, which is one of the most serious birth issues you can have. It’s never been confirmed that air pollution caused this, but it has always been in the back of my mind and definitely had a lasting impact. After doing some research, I found I didn’t have any of the risk factors associated with the condition, but there was evidence to suggest that pollution can contribute to it, and this really stuck with me.
By the time my children started school I was already worried that we had been impacted by air pollution, however after I saw them surrounded by a lot of traffic the feeling was exacerbated, and I started to think about what these conditions could do to their long-term health.
How did Solve the School Run come to life?
Six years ago I started campaigning for cleaner air and safer streets outside of my son’s primary school, but as I had more children, I became for involved with air quality during my maternity leaves.
Returning to work after my third maternity leave, I realised that I had become passionate about air quality and safer streets and that I wanted a career change. So, two years ago I left my day job to set up the charity, which now helps other parents who have the same concerns as me.
Are there any skills from your old job that have helped you in the charity?
Definitely. My background in data analytics and corporate consulting all started from the premise of, how do you use data to make better decisions?
When you’re doing that, you not only have to measure what you’re actually trying to change, which in this case is air pollution, but once you understand that you then need to start measuring the upstream drivers of what’s causing it.
I’ve always worked with this approach in the private sector and there’s absolutely no reason as to why it can’t work in this field. For example, local air pollution monitors showed us that air pollution in our area is at unhealthy levels. But what is causing it? We used our data expertise to publish research in January that showed that the school run causes massive spikes in air pollution in our area. During term time nitrogen dioxide increased by 50% and public bus delays increased by 50% between 8-9am, which signals to us that the school run is a huge driver of congestion.
From this, we started modelling school run traffic in London itself. The work was funded by the Foundation of Integrated Transport and can be found on our website in an interactive dashboard. You can select a London primary school, ward or borough and see how far children are traveling to school, and how they are most likely to be travelling.
This tool helps councils, and anybody invested in the area, like parents or campaigners, access data and insights they need to implement safer measures such as school streets or crossings.
You founded Solve the School Run with Claire McDonald. How did you both meet?
Our children went to the same primary school, and we campaigned for a school street together. I remember thinking about how passionate she was about clean air because not only was she working to try and implement a school street, but when we met, she was also doing a masters in environmental psychology.
She’s just brilliant. Claire and I are co-directors of Solve the School Run, and we work really well together. While I’m in charge of the data side of things, Claire is an ex-journalist so she’s really great at translating the results we find and writing them up into easy to understand, yet impactful messages that resonate with the public.
For example we have an interactive tool on our website that is very granular and can be used at multiple levels. So a school mum could use it to understand how many children are travelling sustainably to their school, to make the case for a zebra crossing or a school street. Or a council officer might use the borough level insights on how many pupils are being driven to schools as part of their school active travel and school street program planning. These are two very different cases and finding the simple, key messages from the data that resonate can be hard, but Claire is really skilled at this.
Claire also leads a lot of our campaigns and in general, she’s just an excellent partner in crime.
When you first set up the charity did you have a specific goal in mind?
Absolutely. We have the vision that a safe, clean and green school run should be enshrined in every child’s right. Whether that’s a school bus, a safe cycle to school, or a walk up the road, children shouldn’t have to risk their lives or their lungs just to get to school.
Additionally, when you’re setting up a charity, you also have the goal to be able to make a living from it. There is a practical goal of getting funding and getting the right resources and although there’s still quite a long way to go, I’m really proud of the progress we have made.
Another huge goal we helped deliver was the school street around our local primary school. It went live last September after five years of campaigning, and it has become one of the most complex and ambitious school streets in London. It filters two kilometres of road space and has four ANPR cameras that protect two schools. One is one of the boroughs biggest primary schools and the second is the SEND school next door. The road also previously had around 800 cars on it during peak times, so the new scheme has been transformational. We’ve actually written up this experience on our website as an incentive for people thinking about campaigning to make a difference in their area.
Looking back, it’s crazy to think that our now charity was once just a small local group campaigning for clean air around Rosendale Primary School. We’re all really proud of the progress we’ve made, especially the fact that we have just won a Lambeth Civic Award.
Congratulations on your award! Since starting your charity, would you say the reaction has been positive?
I would say it has been pretty positive both locally and across London. Will Norman who is London’s Walking and Cycling Commissioner, has picked up on some of our facts around the school run, such as it can cause 480,000 car trips in London per day. The fact that such a high authority figure is noticing us, hopefully will increase our call for action.
The research we released in January about the air pollution caused by school run traffic made national news and like most things to do with traffic, it showed that it can be a particularly divisive topic. There is a lot of consensus around the fact that children shouldn’t be exposed to pollution or road danger on their way to school. And we know that almost 50% of parents who drive the school run wish they didn’t have to do it, before air pollution is even brought into the mix. So ultimately everyone wins if we can enable children to get to school sustainably, safely and independently (without their parents) but there is a long way to go to get there.
Part of our findings in our research showed that in our area, the private school term time, in particular, was problematic, increasing air pollution by 27% compared to when state schools were in session. So this brought another controversial element into the mix. Private schools select pupils from beyond the local area, and therefore families have further to travel, and driving rates are higher. Some state schools, like faith schools or grammar schools, can also have wider catchment areas and therefore higher driving rates compared to schools with shorter pupil travel distances.
Can you tell me why you decided to conduct this research and what you found?
Before our school street came into force, it was empirically clear to us, and to a huge number of people that live in the area, that during school term time the roads were absolutely chock-a-block.
In our local area we are surrounded by a lot of schools, both state and private, and there are around four weeks in the year when the children at the state primaries are in session, when the other private schools in the area aren’t. It was almost like a eureka moment for people when there was such significantly less traffic on the roads.
Now, this is partly due to the fact that there are obviously less people driving in the area, but there is also the secondary impact that I then researched. School run traffic is quite unique in the dense timeframe that it happens. If you imagine there’s 480,000 car trips doing the school run each day in London, they all predominantly happen between eight and nine in the morning, and what that does to our road network is push roads over their capacity, which can very quickly create backlogs. So, it’s both the number of cars doing the school run and the very tight timeframe that create this congestion effect.
Very early on we could observationally see this trend, but we wanted to see if it could be proved with data. Around two or three years ago we did a bit of back of the envelope analysis which did show that the school run had a massive effect on congestion, but we recently got a grant from the Foundation of Integrated Transport to expand on it. In this project we were able to use air quality monitors to better understand the correlation between the pollution and bus delays that were caused by the school run during term times.
We found that congestion and air pollution increased when state schools were in session and then increased even more when the private schools in the area also returned. Although this wasn’t a surprise to me at all.
During the school, children and adults aren’t outside for long periods. How much can emissions from traffic actually harm them?
It’s true that they’re not outside for long, however our research found that traffic during the school run can increase air pollution by 50%. It can be more or less in other areas, but this statistic is far from small.
There is also some research from the University of Surrey that shows it takes time for air pollution, particularly around playgrounds, to dissipate. So, although pollution caused by school run traffic only occurs within a one-hour timeframe, it definitely lingers for longer.
If you also think about the seasons and a child’s day, during winter the walk to and from school is usually some of the only time they get outside and can enjoy some fresh air. It is really unfair that this experience should be mired by them risking their lungs and potentially exposing them to long term health problems such as asthma.
Currently your charity is based in Southeast London. Do you have any plans to expand?
Our goal at the moment is to encourage more people in London to use our data tools and make them more aware about how dangerous school traffic can be. However, once we feel as though we’ve got a scalable model and impactful programme, we’re keen to expand to other parts of the country.
Since setting up Solve the School Run what are you most proud of?
I think I’m most proud of our key findings regarding the London school run and our data analytics tool which sits with it. I think it’s going to be really impactful in enabling people to make change in this area and I think that if we want to change how children are travelling to school, we need to be measuring air quality and providing much more granular data on it. This is absolutely part of our ethos.
I’m also quite proud of how our goals have changed. When we first started the charity, our original goal was around trying to highlight the discrepancies in school run traffic. We focused on schools with large catchments because they’re going to have more of an impact on driving than schools with smaller catchments. However this problem is now just one of the systemic issues we focus on. Our goal now is simply to enable children to have safe, clean and green school journeys no matter where they live.
Nicola has been confirmed as one of our speakers for this year’s National Air Quality Conference in London. So, if you have any questions about Solve the School Run or you want to know more about it, you know where you can find her.
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