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UCL CENTRE FOR ADVANCED SPATIAL ANALYSIS
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis University College London 1 - 19 Torrington Place Gower St London WC1E 7HB
Tel: +44 (0)20 7679 1782 casa@ucl.ac.uk www.casa.ucl.ac.uk
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PAPERS
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Setting children free:
children’s independent
movement in the local
environment
ISSN 1467-1298
Paper 118 - Mar 07
1
Paper being offered for the Special Issue of Built Environment on ‘Critical approaches to
designing environments/environments designed for children’.
Setting children free: children’s independent movement in the local
environment
Roger Mackett*, Centre for Transport Studies, University College London, Gower Street,
London, WC1E 6BT (Tel: 020 7679 1554, e-mail: rlm@transport.ucl.ac.uk)
Belinda Brown, The Young Foundation, 17 Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green, London,
E2 9PF
Yi Gong, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, Gower Street,
London, WC1E 6BT
Kay Kitazawa, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, Gower
Street, London, WC1E 6BT
James Paskins, Centre for Transport Studies, University College London, Gower Street,
London, WC1E 6BT
* Corresponding author
2
Setting children free: children’s independent movement in the local
environment
ROGER MACKETT, BELINDA BROWN, YI GONG, KAY KITAZAWA and JAMES
PASKINS
Parental concerns about children’s safety and security are restricting children’s
independent exploration of the local environment. Children are being denied important
opportunities to exercise, to acquire decision-making skills, such as crossing the road
safely, and to develop social skills through interaction with their peers. This paper presents
findings from the project CAPABLE (Children’s Activities, Perceptions And Behaviour in
the Local Environment) being carried out at University College London. Based on findings
from fieldwork carried out with children aged 8-11 in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, the paper
shows the effect of factors such as the number of adults at home, having an older sibling,
having a car or garden at home and living near to a park on the propensity to be allowed
out alone. Then it considers how being allowed out alone affects the amount of time
children spend outdoors, playing with friends and watching television. The paper then uses
data from children who have been fitted with physical activity monitors and GPS (Global
Positioning Satellite) monitors and asked to keep diaries, to show how children’s travel
behaviour differs when they are with adults from when they are not.
Introduction
In Great Britain, children have suffered a loss of freedom in terms of being allowed to go
out of the home alone in recent years. For example, in 1985/86, 21% of children aged 5-10
travelled alone to school. By 2005 this had dropped to 6% (Department of Transport, 2002,
2006). Pooley et al (2005) found similar evidence over a longer period from interviews
carried out in Manchester and Lancaster. They found that about 40% of people born in
1932-41 travelled to school alone at the age of 10-11, whereas about 9% of those born in
1990-91 travelled alone at that age.
Hillman et al (1990) looked more broadly at the issue of children being allowed out
unaccompanied by an adult. They found that in England, 80% of 7-8 year olds were
allowed to go to school alone in 1971. By 1990 this had dropped to 9%. They also looked
at various other measures of the freedom allowed to children by letting them undertake
various activities unaccompanied: for example, crossing the road, using buses, cycling on
roads and going out after dark. In all cases where the equivalent data were collected in
1971 and 1990, the children had less freedom to go out alone in 1990. They carried out
comparable surveys in Germany in 1990, and found that German children were allowed
much greater freedom to go out alone than their English counterparts.
Hillman et al (1990) attribute this trend in the loss of freedom by children to the growth in
car ownership, noting the paradox that the freedom that increasing car ownership has
offered parents has been offset by constraints imposed on them by the perceived need to
escort children more because of the increase in traffic danger.
Pooley et al (2005) identify four factors that have affected the journey to school since the
1940s: first, availability of transport technologies in the form of cars; second, an increase in
parental choice in education which has led to longer journeys to school on average; third,
3
increasing pace of life, which has led to people attempting to cram more activities into a
limited amount of time; and fourth, perceptions of risk, for example the perceived risks
from strangers to children out alone. When the discussion is extended from the journey to
school to children going out of the house more generally without an adult, the list of factors
can be expanded. For example, home entertainment technology has expanded rapidly so
that children now have a range of opportunities at home to listen to music, play electronic
games, and watch multichannel television that may have reduced the relative
attractiveness of going out to play. The changing perceptions of risk have partly led to the
move from free play to organised activities for children: in the past children would play out
on the streets or walk to the local park, now they have to be taken to their football lessons,
dancing classes, and so on, and usually this involves a car journey (Mackett et al, 2005).
This need to escort children by car has greatly added to the complexity of life for parents,
particularly mothers, many more of whom are employed, often part-time, than previously.
There is almost an element of competition between parents to encourage children to go to
as many of these activities as possible, in order to be seen to be ‘a good parent’. Many
children have their out-of-school lives filled by attending these various activities, leaving
little time for free play or going out gaining experience from making decisions about where
to go and whether it is safe to cross the road, and from social interaction with other
children.
Some of the benefits from allowing children out alone have been shown by Van Vliet (1983)
who found, from a weekend diary kept by children in Toronto, Canada, that children who
usually travelled without adults on the bus, streetcar and metro went out on more trips
from home and did so for a greater range of activities.
In Britain, there is evidence that some children are being forced indoors by intolerant
adults who claim that the children cause noise or a nuisance according to a survey carried
out by The Children’s Society (Children’s Play Council, 2003). There are many examples
of bans on playing in many areas, including refusal to allow the erection of a netball hoop
on a village green in Oxfordshire, and a skateboard park in Cumbria and signs forbidding
ball games in many urban areas.
The trends of increasing car ownership, decentralisation of urban activities, more
structured leisure activities for children and greater complexity of family life have interacted
to reduce the opportunities for children to walk about alone and with their friends. These
tend to be exacerbated by parental perceptions about the risks to children out alone.
The purpose of this paper is to present findings from a project that brings these ideas
together. The project, entitled CAPABLE (Children’s Activities, Perceptions And Behaviour
in the Local Environment) is being carried out at University College London (see
http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/capableproject/). CAPABLE followed on from a project to
investigate the effects of the car on children’s volume of physical activity and long-term car
dependency (see http://www.cts.ucl.ac.uk/research/chcaruse/). The most innovative part of
that was to fit about 200 children with activity monitors and asking them to keep diaries
from which it was possible to establish the relative contribution of various activities,
including walking, to children’s energy consumption (Mackett et al, 2005).
CAPABLE involves staff from the Centre for Transport Studies, the Centre for Advanced
Spatial Analysis, the Bartlett School of Planning and the Department of Psychology all at
UCL. In this work, children are being fitted with GPS (global positioning system) monitors
4
as well as using the activity monitors and diaries, so that it is possible to establish where
children go for various activities. Another aspect of interest is whether or not children are
allowed out without an adult. Questionnaire surveys have been conducted of children and
their parents, and various drawing and mapping exercises carried out with the children
(Mackett et al, 2006). The fieldwork was carried out in Lewisham in south-east London,
and in Hertfordshire, the area immediately north of London.
Methodology
In this paper results are presented from fieldwork carried in two schools in Cheshunt in
Hertfordshire, using four research instruments: questionnaires, activity monitors, GPS
monitors and diaries.
The questionnaires contain questions about the child’s personal details and household,
their journey to and from school in terms of length, mode of travel and whom they travel
with, their frequency of use of various modes for other journeys, whether they are allowed
to travel without an adult, and about going to organized activities, visiting friends and
playing. The questionnaires were completed in class, under the supervision of one of the
research team.
Figure 1 The RT3 activity monitor
The activity monitors are RT3 tri-axial accelerometers, manufactured by Stayhealthy, USA,
which measures movements in three directions, as shown in Figure 1. The RT3s combine
all three acceleration vectors to produce an overall vector magnitude (VM) expressed in
terms of activity counts. These can be converted into activity calories using formulae
programmed into the equipment using data on the age, gender, weight and height of the
child. Activity calories are calories used in undertaking physical activity. The RT3s can also
convert activity calories to total calories, that is, including the calories that are used by the
body to function and develop even when the person is passive, by adding on a constant
5
based on the physical characteristics of the person. Activity calories are used in this work
in order to facilitate comparison of the results of this work with other research (it is
recognised that the formulae for converting the RT3 outputs to activity calories have not
been fully validated for such young children). They were set to record movements on a
minute-by-minute basis.
The GPS is a satellite-based positioning system. Twenty four GPS satellites are orbiting
the earth at a very high altitude. By picking up signals from these satellites, a GPS receiver
can locate the user’s position on the ground with a relatively high accuracy of several
metres. Several types of GPS equipment were tested, in order to decide the best in terms
of precision, battery life and acceptability to the children. The GPS equipment used in the
CAPABLE project is the Garmin Foretrex 201 which is small and light-weight so that
children can easily wear it on their wrists all day long, as shown in Figure 2. It monitors
children's locations at set intervals and records them in its memory in chronological order.
These data can be superimposed subsequently on a map or input into a GIS (geographic
information system) so that they can be linked with other spatial data and analysed.
Figure 2 The Garmin Foretrex 201 GPS monitor
Trost et al (2000) have shown that four days of monitoring of physical activity in children
are required. In this study, the volunteers were asked to wear the monitors from a
Wednesday to a Monday, with data being collected for the four days Thursday, Friday,
Saturday and Sunday. These days were chosen so that both school days and weekend
days were included.
The children were asked to complete a travel and activity diary for the four days. An
example extract from the diary is shown in Figure 3. The RT3 output was used as a visual
aid by the child and a researcher to identify high-activity events shown in the trace which
had not been previously mentioned in the diary.
6
Figure 3 The activity and travel diary
The data were initially entered into Excel spreadsheets. Programs written in Visual Basic
were used to integrate the data from the GPS and RT3 monitors into an Access database
to give greater flexibility for analysis. The data from the three sources had to be reconciled
using the times given. The GPS monitors were regarded as accurate. The RT3s were set
to collect activity data in minute intervals using times set from a computer, and so it was
straightforward to integrate these two data sets. It was much more complex to reconcile
these two data sets with the children’s diaries. Travel diaries have long been suspected of
under-recording trips: this is one of the first opportunities to demonstrate explicitly that trips
are missed out from diaries. There were cases when the GPS trace made it clear that the
child had gone out and the diary showed no such entry. Considerable effort was put into
adjusting the times in the diaries to be consistent with the GPS monitors where this could
be done unambiguously. In order to maximize the data collected from the GPS monitors
they were set to obtain a reading for the current location at every possible opportunity.
Occasionally this meant a large number of points within a very short space of time. It was
decided to simplify the analysis by averaging the data in two dimensions to give the
location every minute. This simplified reconciliation with the data from the RT3s which
were set to collect data in one minute intervals. Because of difficulties with the GPS
equipment, for example, significant loss of points or failure of the battery charger, and
children forgetting to complete their diaries, not every child provided a complete set of
data. The events recorded in the children’s activity and travel diaries were classified, using
a typology shown in Mackett et al (2005).
The results presented in this paper explore the issue of children being allowed out without
an adult, in terms the effects on children’s travel behaviour. The focus is on walking trips,
because that is the main form of transport used by children aged 8-11 when they go out
without an adult.
Results
As shown in Table 1, 330 children at two schools in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, completed
questionnaires. Of these, 162 children wore the GPS and RT3 monitors and completed
diaries and provided some data. The latter is not a large number, but it should be borne in
7
mind that the children were being asked to wear two pieces of equipment, one of which
required charging every night, and keep a diary of their activities and travel, for four days.
This was demanding of both child and researcher time. Relatively few of the children
provided comprehensive data because of practical problems such as difficulties recharging
the batteries in the GPS monitors and forgetting to complete their diaries or to wear the
monitors. Also, the data were collected in the period from October 2005 to March 2006,
which includes winter in Britain and therefore not an ideal time to collect data on outdoor
activities. The children were in the top three years of primary school, that is, aged 8 to 11.
Table 1. The children in the survey
Boys Girls Total
Question-
naire GPS
etc Question-
naire GPS etc Question-
naire GPS etc
Year 4
(age 8-9) 63 25 48 32 111 57
Year 5
(age 9-10) 54 33 63 36 117 69
Year 6
(age 10-11) 57 16 45 20 102 36
Total 174 74 156 88 330 162
Before examining the travel data from the diaries, the effects of allowing children to go out
without an adult, using data from the questionnaires, will be considered.
As Table 2 shows, 56 % of the children were allowed out without an adult. The proportion
increases with age, in general, with slightly fewer of the Year 4 boys allowed out than the
Year 5. The proportion of boys allowed out is higher than that for girls.
Table 2. Percentage of children allowed out without an adult.
Boys Girls All
Year 4 (age 8-9) 52 33 44
Year 5 (age 9-10) 50 44 47
Year 6 (age 10-11) 86 69 78
Total 63 48 56
The next issue to be considered is the types of travel that they are allowed to do without
an adult, since there is a major difference between being allowed to walk a short distance
along the child’s own road to a friend’s house and being allowed out to wander freely and
use public transport. Table 3 shows the percentage of children allowed to travel without an
adult in various ways. The highest proportion is for travelling to friends’ homes, which, as
implied above, may just be along the road. The second highest proportion is for going out
on a bicycle. This may seem surprising, but many children see cycling as an activity that
they perform on local residential roads rather than as a journey. This is confirmed by the
much lower proportion allowed to cycle on major roads. A high proportion, 63%, is allowed
to cross main roads, which is rather higher than the proportion allowed to go out for a walk.
It may be the case that some of the children walk to school and have been trained to cross
one or more main road on the way, but are not allowed to walk freely. The travel activity
that the lowest proportion of children is allowed to do without an adult is travel by bus. This
partly reflects the fact that bus journeys, by definition, imply travelling considerable
8
distance by home. Boys are allowed to participate more than girls for all the travel activities
except going to organised activities.
Table 3. Percentage of children allowed out without an adult to travel in various ways
Boys Girls All
Visit friends’ homes 82 65 74
Go out on a bicycle 71 65 68
Cross main roads 69 56 63
Go out for a walk 55 42 49
Travel to organised activities 45 53 49
Cycle on main roads 42 24 33
Go on buses 35 28 32
An interesting issue is whether being allowed out alone encourages children to go to more
places, thereby providing them with a richer life. Table 4 shows the proportion of children
visiting various types of places, disaggregated by whether or not they allowed out without
an adult. Looking first at the places the children visit, it can be seen that local shops is the
most popular place, followed by the park, with sports facilities at the bottom, but still with a
high percentage. The ranking is the same for the two genders, with slightly more girls
going to the park, cinema and shopping centres and more boys going to sports facilities.
Table 4. Proportion of children visiting various places
Boys Girls All
Allowed out
without an
adult?
All Allowed
out without
an adult?
All Allowed
out without
an adult?
All
Yes No Yes No Yes No
Local shops 95 92 94 97 91 94 96 92 94
Park 92 89 91 91 95 93 91 93 92
Cinema 90 89 90 91 91 91 90 90 90
Shopping
centres 91 86 89 97 85 91 94 86 90
Sports facilities 87 80 84 84 80 82 86 80 83
It can be seen that that in almost all cases, more of the children who are allowed out
without an adult visit more of the places than those who are not. This suggests that being
allowed out without an adult can offer the opportunity to visit more places. Children who
are allowed out without an adult tend to go to the shops, especially girls, and to sports
facilities, especially boys. More of the children who are not allowed out without an adult go
out to the park. This suggests that children prefer to go around the shops rather than to the
park given a choice. The same proportions of those allowed out with or without an adult go
to the cinema.
The next aspect of being allowed out without an adult to be considered is the impact it has
on other aspects of their lives, as shown in Table 5. In terms of being outdoors, about two-
thirds of the children spend more than three hours outdoors at the weekend, and slightly
under half of them spend this amount of time outdoors during the week. More of the boys
spend time outside than the girls. For both boys and girls, more of those who are allowed
out without an adult, spend these amounts of time outdoors. Given that children are more
active when they are out of the home than when they are in it (Mackett, et al, 2005), this
9
suggests that allowing children out without an adult allows them to be more active. It also
allows them to travel more locally and interact more with the local area.
Table 5. The implications for various aspects of children’s lives of being allowed out
without an adult. Boys Girls All
Allowed
out without
an adult?
All Allowed
out without
an adult?
All Allowed
out without
an adult?
All
Yes No Yes No Yes No
% spending more
than 3 hours
outdoors at the
weekend
80 51 69
64 62 63 73 57 66
% spending more
than 3 hours
outdoors during the
week
57 38 49
44 35 39 51 36 46
% going to a
friend’s house at
least once a week 77 58 70
76 73 74 77 66 72
% spending more
than 16 hours a
week watching TV
etc
25 18 22
19 19 19 22 18 21
The next aspect being considered here is the proportion that goes to a friend’s house at
least once a week. More of the girls do this than the boys, which may be partly a corollary
of more of the boys spending time outdoors. Once again, being allowed out without an
adult is associated with a greater probability of going to a friend’s house. It was shown in
Table 3 that this is the form of trip that the greatest proportion of the children were allowed
to do without an adult.
It might be thought that being allowed out without an adult, which, as it has just been
shown, is associated with a greater likelihood of spending more times outdoors, would be
associated with spending less time watching television and DVDs, and playing on the
computer. As Table 5 shows this is not the case, particularly for boys. More of the boys
who are allowed out without an adult watch a lot of television and similar activities. This
may be associated with parental attitudes, with some parents being more relaxed about
allowing children freedom to choose what they do in terms of going out and watching
television, while other parents exert more control over their children’s lives.
Overall it seems that being allowed out without an adult is associated with being outdoors
and being able to visit friends. This suggests that the greater reluctance of parents to allow
children to go out without an adults than in the past, may be leading to them spending less
time outdoors, and so being active, fewer opportunities to be with friends, and fewer
opportunities to visit various places.
Having examined the places that children say they go to in general and the sort of trips
they make locally from the questionnaires, attention will now be focused on the actual
10
travel behaviour of the subset of them that wore the monitors and completed the diaries
over the period of four days.
These results are only for the children from one school who provided information from both
monitors about walking trips and gave sufficient information in their diaries to facilitate
matching of the trips described in the diaries with the times that they were out of the house
according to the GPS monitors. They are only from one school because, at the time of
writing, the reconciliation between the three research instruments had only been
completed for that school. This all means that data are only available for 38 children, 15
boys and 23 girls. This is not a huge number and the results should be regarded as
illustrative rather than definitive. However, it should be noted, that it is unusual, if not
unique, to have this type of micro-level data on children’s behaviour.
Table 6 shows the speed at which the children moved. This shows speeds for all walking,
and for walking to and from school, broken down by whether or not the child was
accompanied by an adult and by gender. Looking at all walking trips together it can be
seen that children walk much faster when they are with an adult than when not. It is worth
noting that the speed when walking with an adult is about 1 meter per second which is 3.6
km per hour or 2.25 miles an hour, which is a reasonable walking speed which gives some
credence to the results. However, when the children are without an adult they walk at less
than half this speed. The speeds for walking to and from school are broadly similar, but
there are some interesting differences. The children walking to and from school with an
adult walk at the same speed in each direction, whereas the unaccompanied children (only
girls because no boys gave valid data for this trip), walk much faster home than they do to
school. The girls seem to walk slightly faster than the boys.
Table 6. Speed in metres per second
Boys Girls All
Accompanied
by an adult? Accompanied
by an adult? Accompanied
by an adult?
No Yes
All
No Yes
All
No Yes
All
All walking 0.4 1.0 0.8 0.4 1.1 1.0 0.4 1.0 0.9
Walking to
school - 1.0 1.0 0.3 1.1 1.0 0.3 1.1 1.0
Walking
from school 0.4 1.0 0.8 0.6 1.1 1.0 0.5 1.1 0.9
Note: averages over whether or not the child was accompanied include cases where the
accompaniment was not specified.
The discussion above implies that the children move much more slowly when not
accompanied by an adult. However, when the intensities (activity calories of energy
consumed per minute) are examined, as shown in Table 7, a slightly different picture
emerges, particularly for boys. Even though boys have a lower speed when walking
without an adult, they use more calories. This is because speed is measured as units of
horizontal displacement per unit time. It looks as if the boys are moving laterally to the
main direction of movement much more when not accompanied by an adult. In fact,
parents can observe this type of behaviour in children when the children are given the
opportunity to do so on recreational trips rather than being strongly encouraged to walk
directly to or from school. The girls use considerably fewer activity calories per minute
when not accompanied by an adult than when they are, but the difference is less than the
11
equivalent difference for speeds, where unaccompanied girls walk at less than half the
speed they use when walking with an adult. This suggests that girls make fewer of these
lateral movements than boys, preferring a more leisurely form of movement. The slowest
walking recorded was for girls walking with other children and without an adult.
Table 7. Intensity of energy consumption in 10-2 activity calories per kilogramme of body
weight per minute Boys Girls All
Accompanied
by an adult? Accompanied
by an adult? Accompanied
by an adult?
No Yes
All
No Yes
All
No Yes
All
All walking 7.4 6.7 6.3 3.7 6.7 6.3 5.2 6.7 6.3
Walking to
school - 6.0 4.8 3.6 6.7 6.0 3.6 6.4 5.9
Walking
from school 8.0 7.9 7.0 4.0 6.4 6.2 6.0 7.0 6.6
Note: averages over whether or not the child was accompanied include cases where the
accompaniment was not specified.
Another way to examine how children move about is to look at the sinuosity of the
children’s movement by considering the angles that they turn through as they walk along,
as shown in Table 8. Two points need to be borne in mind here: first, the GPS points have
been averaged to give a point every minute, so much of the lateral movement will have
been lost, and second, by recording locations every minute, the slower a person moves,
the move the lateral movement will be picked up. Notwithstanding these issues, it is
interesting to note the differences in the angularity of the children’s movement when they
are with and without an adult. There is much more turning, particularly by the boys, when
they are not accompanied by an adult, as implied in the discussion above on the speeds.
There is also more turning on the way to school than on the way home, whereas one might
expect children to stop to play and run around more on the way home because of the
slacker time constraints.
Table 8. Mean angles turned each minute in degrees
Boys Girls All
Accompanied
by an adult? Accompanied
by an adult? Accompanied
by an adult?
No Yes
All
No Yes
All
No Yes
All
All walking 74 43 44 63 35 39 68 38 41
Walking to
school - 51 50 67 37 43 67 42 44
Walking
from school 78 24 35 55 26 29 67 25 31
Note: averages over whether or not the child was accompanied include cases where the
accompaniment was not specified.
This all suggests that children do behave differently at a microscale when they are allowed
out without an adult.
12
Conclusions
This paper has presented some results from an ambitious project to understand how
children interact with the local environment. The focus in this paper has been on whether
the children are allowed out without an adult and the implications of this for where they go,
and then the nature of their walking behaviour and how this is influenced by whether or not
they are accompanied by an adult.
About 56% of the children are allowed out on their own, with more boys being allowed out
than girls. There is a wide range in the proportion of the children who are allowed to
undertake various types of local travel, ranging from making very local trips to friends or
recreational cycling near home, to going out on longer trips involving using buses or
cycling on main roads. Children who are allowed out alone are able to visit a greater range
of places, particularly to shops and sports facilities. Children who are allowed out without
an adult are more likely to spend time outdoors than other children, and to visit a friend’s
house frequently. They also appear to more likely to spend a large amount of time
watching television and DVDs and playing computer games. This may be due to them
being allowed greater freedom by their parents than other children.
The nature of children’s walking behaviour has been considered, in terms of their speed of
travel, their energy consumption and their angular movement. It was found that the
children appear to walk more slowly when they are not with an adult, but this is, partly,
because they tend to move about laterally to the main direction of movement, particularly
boys. This much more sinuous type of walking may well be associated with exploring the
environment and socialising, both of which are very important aspects of children’s
development which are facilitated by allowing children to go out without an adult.
From the literature it is clear that children are allowed out without an adult much less than
they used to be. This paper has shown that more of those who are allowed out without an
adult go to various places, and that when children are out alone or just with their friends
they behave rather differently. Rather than walking along at an adult pace to reach the
destination as quickly as possible they move around in the environment much more. It will
take further research to establish exactly what they gain from this more exploratory type of
movement, but it is based on them deciding where to go and what to do, and that is an
important part of growing up. It is being lost to children who are not allowed out without an
adult, and that may be a very great loss with all sorts of implications.
Acknowledgements
This paper has been written as part of a project entitled ‘Children’s Activities Perceptions
and Behaviour in the Local Environment (CAPABLE)’ which is being funded by the UK
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under
grant GR/T09378/01 for 2 years and 5 months from August 2004. It was carried out at UCL
as a joint project between the Centre for Transport Studies, the Centre for Advanced
Spatial Analysis, the Bartlett School of Planning and the Psychology Department. The co-
operation of the children who took part in this exercise and their teachers and parents is
greatly appreciated, as is assistance from Hertfordshire County Council.
13
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