Airflow’s Pollution & Schools Report

Tuesday 09 May 2023

Air quality is the term used to describe the level of pollution in the air we breathe.

According to Public Health England, the UK’s annual mortality rate from human-made air pollution is between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths.

Children breathe more rapidly than adults and so absorb more pollutants, plus they have smaller airways. Additionally, they suffer from more respiratory infections than adults, making them more susceptible to the effects of air pollution.

However, more than a million UK children are being educated in areas with high levels of harmful air pollution, spending at least 32.5 hours there every week. As well as their health, poor air quality can impact their behaviour and concentration levels.

Charting the scale of the problem

At Airflow, we analysed the latest available air quality data from Defra, to discover which areas of the UK had the poorest air quality over the last year. We then calculated how many schools are in the worst-affected areas and examined what councils/local authorities are doing to help these vulnerable schoolchildren.

We compared the amounts of five key pollutants against the government’s national air quality objectives for maximum levels, as an indicator of the air quality in each area:

Nitrogen dioxide
Sulphur dioxide
Ozone
Particulate matter (PM2.5 & PM10)

Key findings

London is home to 7 out of the 10 worst-affected areas
Kensington and Chelsea had the worst overall air quality, with 59% more nitrogen dioxide than the national average
1.4 million schoolchildren are exposed to unsafe levels of nitrogen dioxide
Leicester has the poorest air quality outside London, ranking 5th on the worst-affected areas list
315,045 children (at 686 schools) attend school in the worst five areas
Cardiff has higher particulate matter (PM2.5) levels than London
Manchester’s nitrogen dioxide levels are 17 times higher than those in the Isles of Scilly
Many of the worst-offending areas have actually seen pollutant levels rise over the last year

Large cities outside of London have some of the poorest air quality, but so do many more rural areas close to high-traffic motorways and A roads.

Running through West Northamptonshire is the M1, one of the UK’s busiest motorways, with an estimated 300,000 cars per day. Some of the busiest sections of the M1 are around J7 and J6A near St Albans, where there are high levels of PM2.5 and PM10.

While one of the UK’s most-used roads, the M6, passes through Walsall, which comes 9th on the poor air quality list. Worryingly, many of the town’s 50,000 schoolchildren are learning in close proximity to the road.

This all emphasises the profound effects of vehicle emissions on air quality.

Fighting the problem

Many local authorities and boroughs have outlawed cars from school streets at the start and end of the school day. Other common measures include clean air zones, anti-idling campaigns, and green barriers between schools and roads.

However, according to a 2022 survey we conducted, over a quarter of teachers (27%) said they knew of efforts to improve air quality that were abandoned due to a lack of funding or government support.

Read the full report here: The Pollution & Schools Report (airflow.com)