11+ school preferences and daily commute

[PurpleDuck]

I wondered whether you dropped off at school on route somewhere else, or was it a 'dedicated taxi service' ; I can see how that can take a fair bit of your time. You mention that a bus would take twice as long. I imagine the reason you do the school runs is precisely because you don't want your DS to have a long and exhausting journey to school - which was the point I was trying to make.

You have caught me out on that one It is partially a "dedicated taxi service" as we have been able to change working hours around to reduce travel (and thus petrol costs) to make sure DS is delivered and collected on time, but it is still out of our way. And you are right, we did decide to do that so that DS would have less commuting time and more free/study time.

You win the argument about parents not thinking about travel before choosing a school... on our CAF and our appeals we only chose those schools that we felt we could get to (albeit with a bit of jiggling).

From what I can see, our thinking is along similar lines - choosing the most suitable school for our DCs we can, while bearing in mind how to get there.

[Moon unit]

The posts I cannot understand are the car share requests.
While its one thing to end up sharing lifts to school events with friends who live locally I would just never expect my child to be in a car share with people we had contacted over an Internet forum. I know others would disagree but I just couldn't run with that.