So you've just dropped the kids off at school, inched your way back through nose-to-tail traffic and effed and blinded while trying to find a parking space within half a mile of your house, yes? Well, seek no sympathy here, reader, because you shouldn't be in the car at all: this is national Walk Your Child to School Week.

The accompanying message this year is not just about physical exercise, saving the environment and the risk that your children run of developing derrières the size of Tinky Winky's if you don't stop ferrying them everywhere. No, the headline this year is that by driving your cotton-wool kids to school, you are actually upping their chances of being run over.

Living Streets, the charity behind the campaign, today publishes a report, Backseat Children, which says that children who have not practised walking to primary school fail to learn traffic awareness and therefore are more vulnerable on the roads. The majority of primary school children live only about a mile from their school, yet the proportion who walk there has declined over the past 30 years. At peak time one car in five on the road is doing the school run.

Tony Armstrong, the chief executive of Living Streets, says: “Young children are increasingly protected from traffic by being driven in cars, but the most effective way of securing their safety is for them to learn through real-life experience.”

While this is undeniably true, you might want to argue that your child is safer strapped into a booster seat than walking along on the pavement, at the mercy of some mobile phone-wielding Sloane Ranger driving a Chelsea tractor with bull bars that could flatten a ten-year-old while barely grazing the vehicle's paintwork. Because you can bet the housekeeping money that Mrs Sloane won't be embracing the spirit of Walk Your Child to School Week.

Still, this is a time to take the moral high ground and lead by example. Hold your head high, burn off those calories and on no account succumb to the temptation to pull off her wing mirrors.

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