Travel to school the Safe and Healthy Way

The Barnby Dun ‘Safe and Healthy Routes to School Campaign’ brings together parents and staff interested in reducing the impact of cars on the neighbourhood and improving the environment for pupils and the community around our school.

Our aims are:-

·        To enable Children to feel safe walking to and from school.

·        To encourage parents to consider alternatives to driving their children to school.

·        To improve pedestrian and road safety and environmental quality for all the neighbourhood.

Children, staff and parents at Barnby Dun have recently been working on a safe routes project in order to establish a school travel plan.  The aim is to encourage more families to walk and cycle to school and to campaign for facilities that will enable them to do so.

We are aware that families who live outside the village

may not be able to walk. We are therefore investigating

safe areas to park in order to establish a ‘Park and Stride’

scheme.

However, if you can walk with your children there are

many benefits:-

·        It’s healthy! Walking is good exercise.  It’s not always easy to find the time to take the regular exercise that is vital to our health.  Using the journey to school is a good way of fitting exercise into a busy life.  Fit and healthy children are better equipped to cope with school work and less likely to be off school through sickness.  Walking is good for mum and dad too!

·        It wakes you up! Good for filling your lungs with oxygen and getting you ready for the day.

·        It helps to make it safer for everyone else.  By walking and not travelling by car, less cars are parking on the streets around school making crossing roads etc much safer for everyone else.

·        It is a wonderful way to have some ‘quality time’ with your child.

We believe that young children should be accompanied to school.  This can be the time to teach good habits such as finding a safe place to cross etc.  As a result when children are older and want to walk on their own they will have a good sense of road safety and you will know their capabilities.  They will also have walked the route many times with an adult and be familiar with the safest route to school. We have a strong commitment to road safety and children in Years 1 and 4 undertake ‘stepping across pedestrian training’ around school with the DMBC road safety training team.

The journey to school is always the responsibility of parents and it is up to each parent to decide when their child is old enough to travel to school unaccompanied.  For those children who are not yet old enough we would like to encourage more families to walk to school together and to make it safer for them to do so. 

We will be establishing a travel plan working group who will meet once a term to discuss safe and healthy ways to travel to school. 

If you would like to be included in this group please contact the school office and leave your name, address and telephone number.