IF you live half a mile from your local primary school, you might reasonably expect your children would go there.

But that is no longer the case in Bournemouth.

As the Daily Echo reports today, many parents in the borough are going to have to trek several miles across town after finding their local schools heavily oversubscribed. The town is faced with the crazy prospect of having children travel miles from their friends and communities to go to school – with some children from Muscliff, for example, heading for Kinson.

It will make Walk To School Week events interesting.

To some extent, this is happening to councils all over the country, owing to an unexpected population boom a few years ago.

But most councils did not recently decide - as Bournemouth did at Townsend in 2008 - that it would be a good idea to close a primary school.