“When I ran to her I saw blood everywhere”

Mother shares story of her 12-year-old daughter’s hit and run as research shows over 440 children injured every year during school run in London

Parent campaigners are calling for councils to create school streets and discourage the use of sports utility vehiles (SUVs) in urban areas.

Solve the School Run and Clean Cities are calling for all councillors in London to commit to a ‘Safer Streets for Kids’ manifesto.

Solve the School Run has marked Road Safety Week by highlighting how every year 443 children in London suffer injuries on the school run alone. 

The campaign has been sharing real-life stories to underline its call for more school streets. 

Aaishah’s story

The parent of a 12-year-old girl from Kennington, South London has told the story of how her daughter was nearly killed by a hit and run driver, but no action was taken by the police. 

Farhia Mohammed, a mother from South London, has for the first time publicly shared the harrowing story of her 12 year old daughter’s hit and run in January last year. 

Aaishah, now 14, was walking home her younger sister, then aged 8, from school and turned around to go to football practice on Black Prince Road in Kennington. 

“We live on the Ethelred estate so cars shouldn’t be driving that fast outside our home. A grey car came speeding around the corner and drove right into her. She was thrown to the ground sideways and hit her face on the bonnet as she fell. She was bleeding from the mouth with broken teeth but the driver just drove off. To this day she has been traumatised, as we all are, and still has a loss of sensation in her knee nearly two years later. 

“There was blood everywhere. She looked so scared. The surgery was traumatic and my daughter was off school for several weeks, falling behind in class. She had to have emergency dental surgery and now has a prosthetic tooth. She had 24 stitches in her gum and 22 in her chin. We have to do something to make our roads safer for our children. It made me so scared to let my daughters out again.” 

“The police didn’t come on the night the incident happened. They only came after a couple of days but there was no further action against the driver. She claimed the child was fine but she lost her front teeth and a tooth went inside her gum. I was left so angry about how little was done to punish the woman who did this and to prevent this from happening again. 

Parents want action

Farhia Mohammed is retelling the event for the first time as new research shows thousands of children were injured on the roads of London – many as they walk to and from school. Parents have been holding vigils calling for safer streets across the capital, with protests in Lambeth, Lewisham, and Twickenham in recent days and further planned in Camden and Hackney.

Research by Solve the School Run shows on average 443 children are injured on their way to and from London schools each year – equivalent to the number of children in a large primary school. 

Some 16% of these - 72 children – are seriously or fatally injured on the London school run (one fatal injury, 71 serious injuries). Examples of ‘serious’ injury are fracture, internal injury, severe cuts, crushing, burns (excluding friction burns), concussion, severe general shock requiring hospital treatment, detention in hospital as an in-patient. 

In total, 6,181 children suffered injuries on the road across London – 1,006 were killed or seriously injured – in the past three years. 1,328 were during the school run.   

Ben’s story

Katy Heald has also shared the story of how her 4-year-old son, Ben was nearly crushed under an SUV when riding on his bike. 

“We were at a traffic light crossing outside our local station. The traffic was nose to tail, as it often is at the end of the school day, and an SUV had stopped just over the stop line. When the green man came on my 4 year old, Ben, went forwards on his balance bike while I followed with my toddler in the buggy. The traffic beyond the crossing shifted forward and the driver of the SUV - rather than observe the red light and green man, or even check the crossing was clear – moved with it. 

“I screamed but by the time she realised what she'd done she had driven over the front wheel of Ben’s bike. The wheel and front fork of his bike were crushed, which tells you how close the wheel was to his leg. The driver had no idea that he was even there until his bike was under her car as the bonnet was so high, and we saw no evidence of the automatic braking or collision avoidance systems that car manufacturers talk about. 

“Ben was distraught and so was the driver, who had her own kids in the back of the car. We need safer streets all the time, but particularly during the school run, when thousands of children are walking and cycling on the streets at the same time as thousands of cars are on the roads.” 

A manifesto for change

Solve the School Run together with Clean Cities are calling on all councils to sign up to their Safer Streets for Kids manifesto ahead of next year’s election. It includes calls to implement school streets which restrict car traffic at pick-up and drop-off times and action to discourage SUVs with higher parking charges, which are far more dangerous for children.  

London councils are being urged to commit to the following in the London local elections next year to make London streets safer for kids:??

• An effective school street for every school - a school street is when the road by a school is closed to traffic during the hours of school drop off and pick up, keeping children safe. 
• Access to a cargo bike for every family - this could be through subsidies, secure bike parking options or bike share schemes. Cargo bikes are (typically) e-bikes and carry children within them. 
• Reallocate kerb space in a child-friendly way - more double yellow lines and crossing points to improve sightlines, so children can see and be seen, along with parking tariffs to discourage SUVs and carspreading.

A call for action

According to analysis of Transport for London road collision data by parent campaigners Solve The School Run, the trip to school is one of the most dangerous journeys many children make.

Despite it only being 7% of a child’s waking day over a year, it accounts for 21% of all road injuries to children. The data analysis focused on 8-8.59am and 3.15-4.14pm during London school term time. The research covers official accident information in the past three years (2022-2024).

London’s Walking and Cycling Commissioner, Will Norman, said: “Every death and injury on London’s roads is a tragedy, and especially when it involves a child. The Mayor, Transport for London and London boroughs are committed to eliminating deaths and serious injuries on the roads. We are investing heavily to reduce road danger and to make it easier and safer for children to walk, cycle and scoot to school. London now has over 800 school streets, a cycle network of over 400km and we are transforming dangerous junctions and pedestrian crossings across the capital.”  

All injuries in the dataset have been recorded by the police – rather than a hospital – and evidence suggests that non-fatal injuries are considerably under-reported. In addition, research suggests that up to a fifth of casualties reported to the police are unrecorded by them, and that they often under-estimate the injury level due to the difficulty of distinguishing the severity of an injury at the scene of the accident. 

Claire McDonald, co-founder of Solve The School Run, said: “We wanted to shine a light on the very real danger that children face getting to school. As parents we see and feel it every school day. We wanted to turn that experience into numbers that councils can understand, to demonstrate the need for immediate action.”

Children are disproportionately at risk if they walk or cycle to school. Children walking and cycling to school in London make up 57% of all school run journeys whilst making up 78% of school run casualties. Solve the School Run says this demonstrates the need for councils to take much more action to protect children as they make their way to school, particularly given that almost all children will need to walk, for at least some of their journey.

“Councils have the power to transform the journey to school for thousands of children. And many of them are already doing it, with school streets, bike lanes and increased parking tariffs on SUVs. But we want more,” said Claire McDonald. “We want councillors to pledge to save children's lives, give them back their independence and bring the joy of freedom into their lives. They can do this by committing to our pledge.”

School run traffic makes up over 25% of morning rush hour traffic. Across the capital, nearly a quarter of pupils in London (24%) are driven to primary school every weekday, which equates to an extra 240,000 car trips on the roads during each of the morning and afternoon rush hours.

Solve The School Run is a parent-led charity that combines unique data insights with experience of real-world, parent-powered solutions. Fed up with the chaos, congestion, road danger and air  pollution children have to face on the school run each day, they focus on data that highlights the issues and informs the solutions. They think all families should be able to have safe, convenient and sustainable options for getting children to school. The Streets for Kids campaign page can be found here.

Clean Cities is Europe’s largest network of organisations on a mission to build public support for cities to shift from polluting cars to active, shared and electric mobility. Clean Cities is hosted by T&E.