Unwillingly to school

It is hard for those outside the professional world to make much of the job advertisements in the Guardian's Wednesday Society section. The job titles are obscure and the description of duties are obscurer, even if the salaries are sometimes all too clear.

My favourite advertisement in today's edition is for a "Schools Travel Adviser":

We are looking for someone to develop School Travel Plans within schools in Bolton.You will be responsible for planning, compiling, implementing, managing programmes of work, and evaluating the Plans.

It happens that I once published an article on the Spiked website bemoaning the fact that:

what used to be a mundane task - deciding how our children get to school - has become the focus of concern for a whole range of professionals. So at Horndean Community School* in Hampshire there is a 'safe routes to school' committee, chaired by a representative from the sustainable transport charity Sustrans and including pupils, teachers, governors, parents and the parish, district and county councils.

Now this process seems to be accelerating through the employment of dedicated local authority staff.

How long will it be before we hear a council say: "We would like our children to walk to school, but it is just too expensive"?

* I found this example from a trawl of the net, but it happens that I was born in Horndean.