Active transport Mode of travel Multilevel model Sociospatial Secondary Pupils Motorised transport a b s t r a c tThe increase in average distance from home to secondary school over recent decades has been accompanied by a significant growth in the proportion of pupils travelling to school by motorized means as opposed to walking or cycling. More recently this switch in travel mode has received considerable attention as declining levels of physical activity, growing car dependence and the childhood obesity "crisis" have pushed concerns about the health of future generations up the public health agenda, particularly in the U.S., but also in the UK and Europe. This has led to a proliferation of international studies researching a variety of individual, school and spatial characteristics associated with children's active travel to school which has been targeted by some governments as a potential silver bullet to reverse the trend. However, to date national pupil census data, which comprises annual data on all English pupils, including a mode of travel to school variable, has been under-utilised in the analysis of how pupils commute to school. Furthermore, methodologically, the grouped nature of the data with pupils clustered within both schools and residential neighbourhoods has often been ignored -an omission which can have considerable consequences for the statistical estimation of the model. The research presented here seeks to address both of these points by analysing pupil census data on all 26,709 secondary pupils (aged 11-16) who attended schools in Sheffield, UK during the 2009-10 school year. Individual pupil data is grouped within school, and neighbourhood, within a cross-classified multilevel model of active versus motorised modes of commuting to school. The results support the findings of other research that distance to school is key, but suggest that sociospatial clustering within neighbourhoods and schools is also critical. A further finding is that distance to school varies significantly by ethnicity, with white British pupils travelling the shortest distance of all ethnic groups. The implications of these findings for education and transport policy are discussed.

How children travel to school is at the centre of a complex set of interrelated issues with significant policy implications. This paper reviews the relation of patterns of travel to school to concerns about public health, school choice, urban form, and residential housing markets. The spatial relations between pupils' homes and the schools that they attend provides the basis of an analytical framework that links local neighbourhood characteristics, school performance, and house prices to the distance and mode of travel to school and the level of 'excess commuting' in the urban system. A unique analysis of several integrated micro-data sets from Sheffield, UK, suggests that, while there are high levels of excess commuting, there remains a complex interrelationship between housing and neighbourhood characteristics, school performance, and commuting patterns. There are differences between the pictures for primary schools and secondary schools. Policies aimed at promoting transport efficiency and those promoting school choice are likely to remain in tension.

Background The rising prevalence of mental health problems is a growing public health issue. Poor mental health is not equally distributed across social groups and is associated with poverty and insecure housing. An evaluation of a social housing intervention provided an opportunity to explore the connections between housing and wider determinants of health and wellbeing. Methods We undertook 44 interviews with social housing tenants over a two-year period to explore their views on housing, health and wellbeing. Results Poor mental health was common. The results suggest that perceptions of housing quality, service responsiveness, community safety, benefit changes and low income all have a detrimental effect on tenants’ mental health. Conclusions Social housing providers who wish to have a positive impact on the mental health of their tenants need to consider how to best support or mitigate the impact of these stresses. Addressing traditional housing officer functions such as reporting or monitoring home repairs alongside holistic support remains an important area where social housing departments can have substantial health impact. Tackling the complex nature of mental health requires a joined up approach between housing and a number of services.

There are longstanding concerns about volatility in the UK housing market. The price volatility of the market at a national level has been the subject of significant political and academic attention. At the same time, the housing market has become increasingly spatially differentiated. This paper seeks to connect issues of housing market change and differentiation to the separate literature on demand and mobility processes. The paper begins by considering the nature of price changes in the UK housing market over the past 40 years. The emergence of widening regional disparities in house prices since the 1980s is remarked upon and a number of supply-and demand-side drivers of the housing market and of volatility are discussed. The paper then focuses on the potential role of residential mobility, particularly selective migration, between areas of similar socioeconomic characteristics in exacerbating market differentials. It concludes with a number of policy suggestions, notably that there remains an important role for demandside responses to volatility and for sub-regional planning for housing in the UK.

This paper provides a commentary on the contemporary housing crisis in England and links it to broader questions of role of housing in capitalist economies and societies. It starts with the assumptions that housing and community development issues are linked to the wider housing market and that the housing crisis is not new but has long-run antecedents. The paper begins by reviewing the contemporary terrain of housing markets and policies in the UK. It then discusses several aspects of 'crisis': market volatility, rates of new supply, affordability, state welfare subsidies and sociospatial inequalities. Policy responses to these are examined through a discussion of efforts to expand the role of the private rented sector, sell-off 'expensive' public housing and curtail market renewal investments. The paper concludes that current conceptualisations of the value of housing are often partial and insufficiently integrative and that policies must explicitly recognise housing as a social and economic asset.