Child Road Casualties Are Rising as Councils Cut School Crossing Patrols

Government figures published this year show 2,432 children under 16 were killed or seriously injured on Britain’s roads in 2025, a 3% rise on the average for 2022 to 2024. Over the same period, councils across England and Scotland have been removing the school crossing patrol service that stands between children and traffic twice a day, five days a week. School crossing patrols are not a statutory service in England, which means a council can withdraw one at any time, for any reason, with no legal requirement to replace it.

Croydon Council ended its patrol service at the last six schools still using it, Cypress Infants and Juniors, Norbury Manor Primary, Orchard Way Primary, Monks Orchard, Oasis Academy Ryelands and Greenvale Primary, by the end of summer 2025. The withdrawal followed a 2022 decision to phase the service out across the borough entirely. A Freedom of Information investigation later found that no road safety assessment had been carried out near any of the affected schools until July 2025, nine months after the cuts had already taken effect.

Cuts That Save Almost Nothing

In Scotland, North Ayrshire Council voted in February 2026 to axe 17 school crossing guards across the region as part of a budget aimed at closing a £15.7 million funding gap. The saving from the cuts came to £92,000, a fraction of one percent of the shortfall the council was trying to close. Parents gathered outside council offices to protest the decision, and a petition against the cuts drew hundreds of signatures. The council pressed ahead regardless.

In Dorset, Ferndown’s middle and first schools lost their crossing patrol officer in 2026 after the council installed two zebra crossings on Church Road and ruled that patrols could no longer be positioned there. A petition against the decision collected 1,150 signatures. Dorset Council defended the move, arguing the new crossings provided an adequate replacement, a claim parents at the school disputed on one simple point: a zebra crossing has no trained adult watching for the specific moment a child steps into the road.

A Service With No Legal Floor

Councils that cut crossing patrols point to the same justification each time: the service costs money, it is not required by law, and responsibility for getting a child safely to school rests with parents and carers rather than the local authority. That argument holds up in a narrow legal sense. It says nothing about what happens to the children who cross those same roads the following Monday morning with nobody trained to stop traffic for them.

Road Safety GB, the body representing road safety professionals across the UK, has put the state of the crossing patrol service on the agenda for its National Road Safety Conference in Leeds this November, examining how the service is being managed, and in some cases withdrawn, by local authorities nationwide. The inclusion reflects a service under sustained pressure in council budgets that have little room left after statutory duties are funded first.

The Numbers Behind the Decisions

A school crossing patrol officer typically costs a council between roughly £6,000 and £10,000 a year in wages, depending on hours and location, a modest sum set against the multi-million pound funding gaps most councils are trying to close. North Ayrshire’s £92,000 saving against a £15.7 million deficit illustrates the pattern: crossing patrols rarely move the needle on a council’s finances, but removing them is visible, quick to implement and does not require a vote on council tax, adult social care or any of the larger budget lines that dominate local politics.

Meanwhile, the roads those patrols once managed have not become any safer. The 3% rise in child killed-or-seriously-injured casualties recorded for 2025 sits against a backdrop of heavier traffic around school run times and an increase in larger vehicles on residential streets. Parents pushing back against patrol cuts consistently make the same point: a lollipop officer does more than manage traffic flow. They watch for the child who runs ahead, the driver who does not see a small pedestrian at bumper height, and the moment a crossing truly is not safe, no matter what the road markings suggest.

A Long Decline From a National Standard

School crossing patrols became a familiar fixture of British streets after the role was formalised in 1953, and for decades most primary schools with a road crossing nearby could expect a trained patrol officer to be there every school day. That national provision has thinned considerably over the past fifteen years, as council transport budgets absorbed repeated real-terms cuts and crossing patrols, unprotected by statute, became one of the easiest lines to remove without a change in the law. The current wave of cuts in North Ayrshire, Dorset and Croydon is not an isolated set of local decisions. It continues a pattern that road safety campaigners have tracked for over a decade, with individual authorities each treating their own reduction as a small, defensible saving while the cumulative national effect leaves far fewer protected crossings than a generation of parents grew up expecting. A patrol officer costs a council roughly the same today, in real terms, as it did twenty years ago. What has changed is the willingness of stretched local budgets to keep funding a service with no legal requirement attached to it, and no lobby in town hall budget meetings as loud as the ones defending statutory duties such as adult social care and homelessness provision.

The legal status of a patrol officer is stronger than many drivers realise. Under the Zebra, Pelican and Puffin Pedestrian Crossings Regulations, a driver who fails to stop when a school crossing patrol officer displays their stop sign commits a specific road traffic offence, carrying penalty points and a fine in the same way as ignoring a red traffic light. That legal force only has practical effect while a trained officer is present to invoke it. Remove the patrol and the protection built into that regulation disappears from the crossing entirely, regardless of what road markings or signage remain in place.

How to Fight a Patrol Cut in Your Area

Parents who want to challenge a crossing patrol cut have more power than councils often suggest, provided they act early and use the right channels.

• Submit a Freedom of Information request asking for the road safety assessment carried out before the decision was made. Councils are required to hold this information, and a missing or late assessment, as happened in Croydon, strengthens any formal objection.
• Raise the issue with your local councillor and ward committee before a budget vote, not after. Decisions are far harder to reverse once they have been formally approved.
• Build a petition with a specific, numbered ask, such as retaining the patrol for a fixed trial period pending a new safety audit, rather than a general objection that is easy for a council to dismiss.
• Ask the school to formally request a road safety audit from the council’s highways team, which can independently assess whether a proposed alternative, such as a zebra crossing, provides equivalent protection.
• Look at a School Streets scheme as a parallel campaign. These restrict motor traffic outside the school gate at drop-off and pick-up times and have been adopted by councils including Brent, where a similar camera enforcement scheme now issues penalties to drivers ignoring the restriction.
• Contact Road Safety GB or your regional road safety partnership for data and precedent from other councils that have reversed or delayed similar cuts under public pressure.

Brent Council has already shown how camera enforcement outside schools can generate large sums from drivers who ignore restrictions, a scheme covered in our report on how Brent fined drivers nearly £12 million under school street cameras in a year. Parents comparing a camera scheme against a human patrol officer should ask their council which one it is actually proposing, and why.

Sources:

• https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-provisional-results-2025
• https://insidecroydon.com/2025/09/18/council-lied-about-risk-assessments-for-axed-lollipop-patrols/
• https://www.irvinetimes.com/news/25044617.angry-parents-protest-save-school-crossing-patrols/
• https://nationalroadsafetyconference.org.uk/