The early morning "school run" is responsible for almost a third of polluting traffic on the roads, the government warned yesterday.

The education secretary, David Blunkett, said his department was looking at the problem and wanted targets to increase the levels of walking, cycling and bus use.

He called for an end to "the vicious cycle in which unsafe roads lead parents to prefer driving their children to school", saying 24,000 people were now estimated to die prematurely each year because of air pollution.

Education has a critical role to play in ensuring that young people learned to protect and respect the world in which they were growing up, Mr Blunkett told a conference in London organised by the Labour Environment Campaign. "This can do more than anything to move us away from the image of environmental protection as a fringe, liberal issue to being a core concern across society," he said. "To this end, citizenship will be a new national curriculum subject from September 2002."

The need to develop industries which could deliver sustainable ecological benefits and strong employment growth could not be ignored.