Striding To School

If you were in the playground after school recently, you might have seen this happy character. His name is Strider and he is encouraging children to walk to school.

Strider is part of the Living Streets organisation, who encourage everyone to take a greater interest in making our streets safe, attractive and enjoyable spaces, in addition to making a healthy choice in travelling to school.

For the month of March, children have been recording their journey to school - whether they walked, rode a scooter or bike, travelled by car or by some other means. Since the results are being collated over a long period, it is possible to gain some insight into the travel habits of children here at Hook Junior School.

Perhaps not surprisingly, travel on foot is most popular and two feet are the transport of choice for most children, and in our case we make more journeys to school on foot than the national average. Since we don't have the luxury of parking on the school grounds, 'park and stride' also features quite prominently, with many children walking the final part of their journey to school and making the overall use of cars lower than the national average. Scooters have well and truly established their place as favorite self powered transport being more popular than bikes, with Year 5 making many more scooter journeys than other classes.

In addition to promoting healthy lifestyles and making our streets better place, Living Streets collate data from schools around the country to build a picture of the transport types and activity levels of children travelling to and form school. One of their aims is to work with local authorities to convert more than 4 million journeys to school from car to walking. More of their aims and achievements are explained in the Living Streets Impact Report.