School transport and child health

Thank you for your excellent editorial entitled “Hitting the books – Homework and the new school year” (TMID, 26 September). I hope that both our Education and Transport ministers have read your editorial, and will read this letter.

As you correctly say: ‘There has been an awful lot of talk about how children will get back and forth from school.” This is certainly the case but there is more to add that is crucial on this aspect of school education.

We have recently been informed that €24 million have been allocated to provide school transport by which, it is presumed, school bus transport will be increased by 60 per cent. Following this announcement, schoolchildren and their parents have been handed a half-fried omelette which reflects a 1950s approach.

As the White Paper published on Monday by our Education Ministry tells us, this might mean “fewer children being taken by parents in the family car”. Seen superficially this might seem to be a good thing but, like all ham-fisted, easyway-out “one-size-fits-all” policies, it is bound to result in unintended negative consequences.

Furthermore, surely the primary aim of facilitating school transport should be to improve public transport for all and make roads safer so that children are better able to make their own way to school. This helps promote the development of independence in our children and determine their attitude to the use of alternative transport and cycling from an early age. As it is, our children are growing conditioned to be car-dependent.

The proposal to change opening and closing times of some state schools may lead to serious unintended consequences. Catching an early bus to school with earlier opening times will result in a significant sub-group of children waking up extra early to wait for the school bus – this might include extra waiting time to catch the bus. This ignores the possibility of children being deprived of sleep from waking up too early to get to school.

A great many factors have been found to influence children’s cognitive development. An important factor among these is the amount and quality of children’s sleep. The crucial element here is morning waking time.

Of course it can be argued that parents should put their children to bed earlier to catch an early bus, but it does not work like this. Teen children, unlike adults, are wired differently and tend to remain alert until late evening, nearer to midnight. These, and other factors (especially excessive on-screen time) conspire to determine inconsistent bedtime sched- ules and later bedtimes.

What usually happens is that youngsters tend to go to bed later but, because of misinformed education/transport policies, a great many of them will have to wake up early to catch a bus to school and face a struggle with sleepiness every school morning. These children become sleep-deprived.

Such sleep deprivation is happening at an important stage of children’s lives – when they are developing. Studies on inconsistent sleeping times, especially at very young ages and early childhood, show that sleep deprivation is linked to impaired cognitive development and scholastic under-achievement. It is also suspected that this might have knock-on effects throughout children’s subsequent lifecourse.

Transport Malta’s huge investment in school transport has resulted in ill-thought provision for school transport which is counter-intuitive. As usual, the approaches to a problem seem to have been drawn up in isolation and amount to no more than throwing money at a problem rather than working out a solution which will be beneficial to all. It is at odds with what is done in progressive countries where the aim should be to make roads safer and promote the development of independence in children and so determine their attitude to use public transport and cycling from an early age.

As a result of years of unhealthy poorly conceived policies, Malta remains stubbornly at the bottom of every league when it comes to child health: Maltese children are the least physically active in the EU. Only one in four (26 per cent) of Maltese children is physically active. Maltese children and adolescents have the highest overall prevalence of overweight and obesity in the EU and one of the highest prevalence of childhood obesity in the world with 25.4 per cent being pre-obese or obese and 7.9 per cent being unreservedly obese. Such an unhealthy lifestyle will result in loss of ‘Potential Years of Life’ (PYLL) from ill health later on in life.

In addition to the €24 million allocated to school transport, there is also a budgetary allocation of €70 million for ‘road improvement’ which will only serve to exacerbate Malta’s traffic situation. This will only add to the islands’ ill health from lack of physical exercise; it also adds to our car-dependency and pollution at street level which is harmful to children.

The unhealthy life style of our children is reflected by the highest EU prevalence of obesity in our young.