School travel plans
Aim of the school travel plan
Your school travel plan (STP) focuses on journeys to and from school. It can help with strategic issues. These include the health and wellbeing of your school community and tackling climate change. Focusing on active travel improves health and air quality.
The aim of an STP is to enable more pupils, their families and staff to:
- walk
- cycle
- use public transport
- car share
It should be unique to your school. Develop it with the entire school community to identify both issues and opportunities.
It could focus on:
- tackling traffic congestion outside school
- raising road safety awareness
- highlighting a need for better infrastructure
How to develop a school travel plan
1. Create a working group
Set up a working group with people from the school community, including:
- pupils
- parents/carers
- governors
- local residents
Nominate a staff member to lead the development and maintenance of the plan.
2. Get support
Promote your STP to the school community. This could be through:
- newsletters (school or community)
- a pupil assembly
- parent and carer meetings
- an STP event at school
3. Gather evidence
After engaging your audience, start gathering information to inform the STP.
You need to understand the travel patterns of the school community and any issues or opportunities.
To collect evidence, you could use:
- surveys
- pupil school council meetings
- an STP engagement event
Analyse the results to see how the community currently travels and where changes could be made.
4. Develop an action plan
Decide how your school can tackle the barriers and embrace opportunities that the school community identified.
Some ideas you can explore:
- Sign up to Bikeability in schools | East Sussex County Council.
- Set up an after-school bike club for pupils.
- Park and Stride – identify a location where parents and 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.
These organisations have information on school travel initiatives:
- Education | Sustrans – activities to reduce congestion and improve safety
- Walk to School | Living Streets – walking to school safely
- Step up | Sussex Safer Roads Partnership - advice for year 6 students
- Schools and families | Brake – resources to teach road safety
Some of your measures may require funding. For help, see Funding News | East Sussex County Council.
Your action plan should include the timescales for delivery and a named person who will be responsible.
Publish the STP and promote it to the school community.
5. Monitor and review your travel plan
Your STP lead should review your school travel plan annually.
You might monitor travel patterns using:
- annual travel surveys
- the 'mode of travel to school' data from your school census
Review the progress in delivering measures identified in your action plan.
You can include new measures within the action plan, to keep the document live.
