An integral part of any School Travel Plan is the whole school travel survey. This involves getting information about travel trends from pupils, staff and parents. The success of your schemes to reduce car use and increase walking and cycling to and from the site can be judged against this baseline.
If you are making additional bids for larger scale engineering or environmental schemes in the vicinity of the school you will also need to show that you have a good evidence base for your recommendations – e.g. 60% of pupils thought this junction was dangerous to cross.
Please note – when submitting your School Travel Plan you must provide raw numbers and percentages in relation to all your surveys. This is so we can aggregate surveys from across the area to build up a borough picture.
In terms of the information you need to gather from your pupils, the minimum requirement for a Travel Plan are answers to the following two questions:
- How do you usually get to school?
- If you could choose, how would you like to get to school?
A quick way of getting this data is a simple ‘hands up’ survey that is collected by each class and then aggregated up to give a school figure. This provides you with the baseline ‘modal share’ (the percentage cycling, walking, driving etc) for your Travel Plan.
Many schools incorporate the survey design, collection and analysis into a maths or geography session, giving it to a class of children as an ad hoc project.
Alternatively, you may want to gather further data through utilising a more in-depth paper survey. This asks a series of questions about how pupils do, and would like to travel to school, as well as gauging opinion about any possible barriers to walking and cycling.
This is also the simplest and most effective method of consulting with your parents and staff:
Parent Questionnaire Primary.pdf
Parent Questionnaire Secondary.pdf
We recognise that, especially for our larger schools, this maybe quite a daunting process. To help you complete this part of your plan we have therefore invested in two specialised survey packages:
Keypoint: This package allows you to conduct individual pupil level travel surveys online, using our STP website, one-to-one (using a pocket PC device) or on paper. The results are either collated automatically (if you do it online or using the PDA) or can be quickly scanned in using our scanner- saving you hours of tedious data entry. This means you get the data back accurately and quickly, and in a format that can be placed directly into your plan (with standard graphs and tables). You can use our standard questionnaire templates (recommended) or design your own and send us your questions.
IMPORTANT: For us to be able to use our automated scanner the questionnaires must be printed as an exact copy. We can either print and photocopy the required amount of blank surveys and then send them direct to your school, or you can use the sample questionnaires above. If you choose the latter option you must make sure of the following:
- You untick the ‘Auto Rotate and Centre’ option;
- You alter the Page scaling option from ‘Fit to page’ to ‘None’;
- You print (or photocopy) the surveys duplex (i.e. double sided so each questionnaire fits on one sheet of paper).
Planning for real: This is a process of getting pupils and parents to place labelled tags (e.g. ‘speeding is a problem here’ or ‘need more cycle parking facilities here’ etc) into a large scale map of the school and its vicinity. This allows us to zoom in on problem areas and build a good bank of information regards the unique issues that affect each school and neighbourhood.
Check out our gallery for an illustration of how this looks in practice….
Carrying out your Survey:
We would strongly recommend that you tie the completion of the travel survey into classroom projects that are linked to the national curriculum – this is a great way of building awareness and ownership of your plan. There are obvious links to geography, PSHE/citizenship and maths, but with a little imagination it can be brought into almost any subject.
Perhaps the most effective way of completing your survey is to organise a day for the Road Safety team to come in with the mapping and survey software. We can then work with groups of children on travel awareness projects and survey them at the same time. Parental and staff questionnaires can also be distributed on the same day.
This service is currently provided free of charge.
Remember – the more detail you gather about transport trends, the sounder the basis of any recommendations you may make and better the likelihood of your bid for any major engineering or environmental schemes being successful.
Please contact the STA for more details of these services.
