Understanding the interface between local housing markets and education markets: children's travel to school

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The journeys that children make to school symbolise some of the fundamental tensions that exist in urban societies. Parents value choice in their children's education and the freedom to apply to schools in other neighbourhoods. At the same time, however, homeowners also appreciate the value that comes from having a good neighbourhood school near to them. The result in many cities is a complex web of daily journeys to school adding to congestion, environmental degradation and health problems. In Sheffield alone, it is estimated that children travel over 145,000 extra kilometres every day as a result of not going to the nearest school, producing something like 1,400 tons of extra CO2 a year. Levels of car use for the school run are at an all time high, causing public health professionals to worry about an obesity epidemic among school children.There is clearly a delicate balance between policies aimed at improving educational choice and those aimed at reducing congestion or reducing the need to travel. The contemporary market for owner-occupied housing has a key role in this: access to good schools is something that increasingly drives the local housing market and causes significant house price differences between different parts of the city. Yet if demand for travel to school was minimised and every child went to his or her nearest school, that would amplify the housing market's role in educational outcomes, leading to a situation of school 'choice by mortgage' which is unfair for families on lower incomes.Local planners and education officials in Sheffield, as in other cities, are faced with a dilemma as the impacts of housing and transport policy and school choice programmes pull against each other by leading to increases in school trips and distance. To address this dilemma they need an analysis of travel behaviour that recognises the complexity of the relationship between schools, neighbourhoods and housing, and the demand for travel at a variety of geographic scales (at the neighbourhood level and also across the city). Traditional models tell policymakers a lot about many of these factors in isolation and at a single geographic scale, but it is difficult to add them all together to determine the best policy: one that balances educational and environmental outcomes in a fair way.This project will analyse anonymous data on pupils' home addresses, where they go to school, and how they get there. By doing so, a model that is able to look simultaneously at characteristics of the neighbourhood, the housing market, and school choice will be constructed. This model will sit at the centre of a toolkit that can be used by analysts to estimate the travel-to-school implications of changes to housing planning and education policies in the city. This will allow local policymakers to make an objective assessment of the impact of different housing market and school characteristics on travel to school and therefore design housing and access to education policies that are fairer for everybody while protecting the environment and reducing congestion.