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There’s a moment every November when London feels quietly enchanting. The trees turn copper, the light fades by half past four, and the sky fills with colour for Bonfire Night. Why do we celebrate? On 5 November 1605, Guy Fawkes was caught guarding barrels of gunpowder beneath the Houses of Parliament, part of the Gunpowder Plot to kill King James I. Londoners lit bonfires to celebrate the king’s survival, and more than 400 years later we still light up the sky every November

Have you ever set off to take the kids to school, only to turn into the road by the gate and be met by a sign, a camera and a street full of scooters? Welcome to the School Street. School Streets close the road outside a school to most traffic at drop-off and pick-up times, so children can walk, cycle or scoot in safely. The idea began in East Lothian, Scotland, in 2012, and London's first followed in Camden a few years later. Numbers grew quickly from 2020, when councils nee

There is something strange about half-term in London. For five glorious minutes, the morning feels different. No frantic searches for school shoes, no last-minute homework discoveries, no child insisting they cannot leave without a particular jumper nobody has seen since Tuesday. The school run has disappeared. Surely the roads should be empty? Well, not quite. London Without the School Bell Around the school gates, things do go quiet. But everywhere else, families are headin

There’s a particular kind of half-term everyone hopes for, slower mornings, nowhere to rush to, the ordinary rules of term time quietly suspended. Children remember these breaks for years, usually because they were up and ready for the day before anyone else. Parents remember them too, simply glad to have nowhere to be yet. It rarely happens by accident. The families who get this right aren’t doing less, often they’re doing just as much, camps, activities, a full break of thi

The Route – KinRoute's Insights · 5 Oct 2026 When you arrange transport for your child, you check the driver's licence, the car and the reviews. But have you ever wondered how many hours your driver has already been on the road today? It may surprise you, in London, private hire and black cab drivers have no legal limit on their daily working hours (TfL). That covers a lot of drivers: London alone has 104,900 private hire driver licences (DfT, 2026). Why is there no limit? Gr

It's open evening season. Best-school award nominations are being announced, calendars are filling up with school visits, and families with children moving up to a bigger school are facing some important decisions. It's an exciting time, and a busy one. When parents choose between prep schools, results, facilities and fees all matter. But research suggests the factor that most often tips the decision is location. That's according to a 2025 survey of 941 parents by Schoolsmith

Ask a parent in Hounslow and a parent in Tower Hamlets how their morning school run feels, and you'd think they lived in different cities entirely. In one, the school run barely registers. In the other, it's nearly half of everything on the road. The table below shows how much of each borough's morning traffic is simply the school run — parents on their way to drop off. Find yours, and see where you sit. Find your borough: London Borough Share of morning traffic that's the sc

Every school day, roughly 200,000 primary school children in London are driven to school — around 480,000 car trips across the city, morning and afternoon combined. It barely registers as a choice anymore. But it wasn't always this way. Eight out of ten 7- and 8-year-olds walked to school alone in 1971. By 1990 — less than a generation later — that had collapsed to almost none. Somewhere in that stretch, the school run stopped being something children did, and became somethin

Most parents assume there's a clear legal age at which a child can travel alone in a taxi. There isn't. Here's what the law actually says — and why it matters when choosing a transport service for your child. What the law says There is no specific legal age in the UK at which a child can travel unsupervised in a licensed taxi or private hire vehicle. The law does not set a minimum age for travelling alone — it focuses instead on restraints, seatbelts, and supervision in the c

Car seat rules in private hire vehicles aren't complicated, but they're rarely explained properly. Here's the definitive answer — and what it means when travelling with KinRoute. What the law says In the UK, children must use an approved car seat in any private car, van or goods vehicle until they are 135cm tall or 12 years old — whichever comes first. After that, they must wear an adult seatbelt. Licensed taxis and private hire vehicles are treated differently under the law.

Ask a child if they like their driver, and they'll almost always say yes — even when they mean it only a little. Children are naturally polite about the adults their parents have chosen, so with something as routine as the daily school run, the real signs of comfort rarely show up in words. They show up in behaviour. Signs your child genuinely enjoys the journey: They start the conversation, rather than just answering when spoken to They mention something from the car later t