School travel plans
The aim of a school travel plan (STP) is to enable more children or students, their families and staff to use public transport or to walk, cycle or car share to and from school.
Your STP should be unique to your school and developed with the entire school community to identify both issues and opportunities. This could be tackling traffic congestion outside school, raising road safety awareness or highlighting a need for better infrastructure.
You can use your plan to help with more strategic issues, such as improving the health and wellbeing of your school community or tackling climate change.
What steps should you take to develop a school travel plan?
1. Create a working group
Develop a working group with people from the school community:
- pupils
- parents/carers
- governors
- local residents
Then pick a staff member to take responsibility for both the development and maintenance of the plan.
2. Get support
Before you engage with the school community you must promote your STP to them. This could be through:
- newsletters (school or community)
- a pupil assembly
- at parent/carer meetings
- an STP event at school.
3. Gather evidence
After engaging your audience, you should start gathering information to inform the STP.
- You need to understand the travel patterns of the school community and any issues or opportunities. You will need to do this with surveys.
- Consider gathering additional evidence through pupil school council meetings or an STP engagement event.
Analyse the results so you can inform how the community currently travels and where changes could be made.
4. Develop an action plan
Using the results from the analysis, you need to decide how your school can tackle some of the key barriers and embrace opportunities that the school community identified.
You may wish to explore some of the measures listed below. There may be other suitable methods appropriate to your school:
- Sign up to ESCC Bikeability Training.
- Set up an afterschool bike club for pupils.
- Park and Stride – identify a location where parents/carers can park and walk the rest of the way to school.
- Set up a walking bus
- Road safety awareness
- Exploring engineering measures to provide safer routes to school'
We have secured funding to deliver sustainable school travel initiatives within schools in Newhaven, Peacehaven and Seaford, Eastbourne & South Wealden and Bexhill & Hastings. See the details on the East Sussex Active Access for Growth page.
Other organisations might have information on school travel initiatives:
You must present the measures as an action plan, with details of the timescales for delivery and a named person who will be responsible.
Some of your measures may require funding. East Sussex Funding News has the latest information on available funding.
Once your evidence is gathered and the plan is developed you can then publish the STP and promote it to the school community.
5. Monitoring and review of travel plans
Your school travel plan should be reviewed annually by the person nominated.
You might carry out yearly travel surveys to monitor travel patterns or use the mode of travel to school data from your annual school census.
You should also review the progress on delivering measures identified within the travel plan action plan.
You can also include new measures within the action plan, to keep the document live.