EXCLUSIVE fee-paying schools in Winchester have left transport chiefs seething by ignoring requests to draw up plans to encourage pupils to travel by bus, bicycle or on foot.

The county council wants all schools to produce a strategy and the majority of state schools have either produced plans or agreed to look into them. However not a single independent school in Winchester has responded to the council's campaign to cut the number of parents who deliver their children by car. City bosses condemned this oversight as "deplorable" at a meeting of transport bosses.

Private schools say they had no idea the county council wanted them to produce a travel plan. Jo Bartholomew, marketing assistant at Twyford School, a prep school for primary age children, said: "If people are upset with the school for not being in touch that is because we've received nothing about it."

She added many parents drove their children into Twyford because they had much further to travel than most state school pupils. A spokesman for fee-paying Pilgrim's School in The Close, Winchester, said the school was considering buying minibuses to transport youngsters to and from school.

"Some of the children are very little and the parents would want to deliver them to the door," she added.