Outwoods Primary School in Staffordshire leads the way in active and sustainable travel. The school holds an Outstanding STARS School Travel Plan. It has also been named Modeshift STARS National Primary School of the Year. These achievements show its aims and objectives are working well.
Modeshift STARS National Primary School of the Year
At Outwoods Primary School, active and sustainable travel sits at the heart of daily life. The school has built a strong culture of travel behaviour change. Children, staff, and the wider community choose safe, healthy, and environmentally friendly ways to travel.
The Experience
Cycle and scooter storage investment, along with balance bike sessions and Bikeability training has seen cycle and scooting levels rocket at the school from 2.2% to 19.4% over a four-year period while walking levels have remained constant. This strongly suggests that these new cycle and scooter users have most likely come from car use, which is excellent and no easy feat!
A monthly ‘Sensible Cyclist’ award helps to reinforce and embed this positive behaviour change, while breakfast and after school clubs provide cycles and scooters for play and many pupils have learnt to ride as a result of this.
Outwoods also hold regular walking activities that often feature weird and wonderful visitors to school, they’ve had Roman soldiers, dinosaurs, spacemen and magicians accompany children on the walk to school – creating positive memories of walking at an early age.
The Results
On being presented with the award by UK Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Transport Lilian Greenwood MP, the staff and pupils were all smiles and couldn’t wait to call their headteacher to give them the news.
Teacher, Lauren Marshall-Gee said:
‘Thank you so much for a fantastic day. Coming to the awards in London is something our children have been striving towards for the last few years. When we returned from the fantastic history walk we all agreed that it had been the best day and that was before we won!
We didn’t stop smiling all day and on our long journey home, the pupils were sharing things they’d heard in the other presentations that we could also do.’
Conclusion and endorsement
During the judging process, industry experts from national organisations such as The Bikeability Trust and Living Streets cast their votes over the nominated schools. Our industry experts were blown away by Outwood’s statements such as ‘active travel is central to daily life’ with one judge commenting ‘they practise what they preach.’ And in response to their statement on creating ‘confident and informed advocates for positive change’ one judge simply commented ‘BRAVO’.
The success of Outwood Primary School this year is testament to a long-standing commitment to their School Travel Plan work, they first ran a STARS travel survey way back in March 2018 and have always been committed to evaluation and improvement which has ultimately resulted in this year’s success!
Long may it continue!
