Making school travel plans work: effects, benefits and success factors atEnglish schools.

This paper will report on research commissioned by the UK Department for Transport to identify and examine good practice in English school travel planning. The aim of the research was to examine what successful school travel plans could achieve and what factors had been particularly important in achieving success. The work has fed into a DfT good practice guide for local authority school travel advisers, which, on completion, will be disseminated nationally and reflects latest thinking about the best ways to engage with schools in order to make a real difference to children's travel habits. In total, about 90 people closely involved in school travel work were interviewed in detail, and some degree of feedback was received from about a further 100. In terms of impacts on car use, the local authority data showed that when they engage with schools (that are happy to be involved), not all schools reduce car use. However, a high proportion (between 60%and 90%) can be expected to achieve positive modal shift, and a significant percentage (between 15 and 40%) can be expected to reduce car use by over a fifth. This implies that the overall effect of car use at all engagedschools is likely to be in the order of 8-15%. Meanwhile, 28 of the good practice case study schools had data about how total car use had changed. At these schools, (representing 17,800 pupils), the weighted average reduction in car use was 23%, with some schools cutting car use in half. Other gains mentioned from school travel work included safety improvements; reductions in congestion at the school gate; health and fitness benefits; improvements in attendance, punctuality and readiness to learn; and benefits for pupils' personal development and for the wider community. The study showed that the most successful school travel plans typically focused on a variety of initiatives, included significant levels of awareness raising, and had mechanisms in place to ensure that they were sustained over time. New or enhanced bus services, low fares or fare reduction schemes, and (at primary level) specific arrangements to make services more child friendly, to promote bus use. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135582.