THE schools are back as anyone who drives between 8am and 9am or between 2.30pm or 4pm will know.

Yes, the roads in the vicinity of schools in Ludlow, Tenbury and the market towns will be full of parents taking and fetching their offspring.

Much is often said about the danger to children on the roads, but safety is hardly enhanced by the volume of traffic in and around our schools.

The serious side to this is that walking to school, even a relatively short walk, is important exercise and multiplied over the course of a school term and even more so the year, a child that uses his or her legs to get to and from the classroom will get through a lot more calories than one who travels in a car.

Of course, the school run is just one of the reasons for the increasing concern about obesity and lack of exercise for children. The wrong kind of food also plays a part.

But to stay on the theme of exercise surely schools could be doing more than they do. Parents with children of school age tell me that serious sport or games is a thing of the past in almost all state schools.

Playing sport has two elements: formal and informal. In some ways the second of these is just as important and perhaps more than the first.

There was a time when schools at break time would see football or games or tag in the playground. Does this still happen.

After school young people would go out and play football, cricket or perhaps skateboard. Now they are more likely to be found at a games consul or doing something with social media on a computer, tablet or mobile telephone.

Some of them will be doing their homework and whilst studying is important so is exercise.

There is another factor that perhaps can easily be missed. Young people often play sport because they want to emulate their heroes.

There is a generation that would not be considered very old that would be able to watch a wide range of sports on terrestrial television.

But the arrival of subscription channels has changed all of that.

Cricket has largely disappeared from the screens of people who do not subscribe to Sky or BT Sport and for the most part this also applies to live football and tennis.

It is the case with golf and to a large measure rugby.

Even cycling, the one sport that seems to be enjoying a growth spurt requires a subscription to Eurosport for people that want to watch it apart from very occasionally.

However, it least we have the Olympics on BBC every four years but for how much longer now that the rights have been acquired by the Discovery Channel that owns Eurosport.