Promoting Active Travel in Stanwell School

What did you do and how did you involve the whole school?

Our main aim for this project was to promote Active Travel, in accordance with the national agenda, to reduce congestion and pollution in our local community and support healthy lifestyles. In order to do this we utilised pastoral lessons by creating a 3 lesson SOW to involve the entire student body (yrs 7-13). All work was recorded in a booklet and various tasks were added by form tutors into a Googleform so that ideas could be collated.

Lesson 1: We used clips from David Attenborough: A Life on our planet as stimulus and explored the impact of humanity on the natural world.

Lesson 2: We explored what humanity could do to change/reduce the destruction of the natural world. We then discussed/ recorded what could be done on a worldwide, national, local &individual scale. This information was then recorded in a google form and analysed by the eco club.

Lesson 3: We completed a travel audit, then looked at Ultrecht in the Netherlands as a caste study. We reflected on how Active Travel was embedded in Ultrecht’s culture and its successes. We then looked at Penarth, explored whether we thought something similar could be implemented, and discussed any barriers. We also thought of ways in which Stanwell could help promote Active Travel. All info was recorded via Googleform and shared with the Eco Club,.

How and why did you decide on this target?

Whilst completing the Environmental Review we were alerted by both members of the public and our own pupils/staff as to the level of congestion found outside of the school during drop off/ pick up times. As a Committee, we decided that we wanted to try and reduce the amount of traffic, and thought that the most effective way to do this was to encourage active travel. We also felt, that following the pandemic, we should focus on an initiative which would have a positive impact on pupil/ staff mental and physical health. When the Environmental review was discussed with the entire Eco Committee, everyone was unanimous in the importance of the project.

How has the project impacted on your school and your community?

The project has had a positive impact as it has encouraged and promoted Active Travel to the entire school community.  Pupils and staff now understand what Active Travel actually means and have been given motivation to make it part of their lifestyle. We were able to influence pupil and staff behaviour, and make them reflect on their personal impact on the environment; we are slowly, but surely, improving the culture of the school in this respect. Although the survey did not manage to collect data for every pupil, we have devised a new way to collect it and this will help us monitor travel in our school community more accurately in the future – something we plan to do biannually (Oct & June). Some other positive impacts were that 6 members of staff took up the cycle to work scheme, and as seen in the top photo on the right, pupils were also keen to get involved. This also meant that we were able to fully utilise the school bike racks.

How did you celebrate success and what are your next steps?

We celebrated our success by sharing some of the ideas collated from the Googleforms. (e.g ideas for improving Active Travel in Penarth). This was delivered to pupils in pastoral lessons after the SOW had been completed and the information had been analysed by the Eco Club.

Moving forward, we would like to continue to promote Active Travel through initiatives such as ‘Bike to School week’ and the ‘Big Pedal’. We plan to monitor how pupils travel to school, through data collection, and use this to identify times throughout the year when pupils are less likely to actively travel, and introduce initiatives to combat this.