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Review of Research on School Travel
CHAPTER FIVE Conclusions and Recommendations
5.1 Success is defined in many different ways but SSTAG's aim of increasing the proportion of non-car travel to school has many echoes in wider economic, social and environmental objectives. From this review, more can be concluded about how to improve choice, influence behaviour, and manage and administer school travel in Scotland, than on what the overall impacts of these measures will be on car use. Overall, there are a few key issues emerging which, if tackled, will allow positive progress on a broadly based agenda.
5.2 The first key issue is that in the past the importance of social factors has been underestimated in school travel planning. Social relationships between children, parent to child, and between children with other adults including drivers, are key factors affecting travel choices. Knowledge of safe and efficient practices is important, but travel also needs to fit in with family schedules, and be viewed as socially acceptable by the local community for change to be achieved.
5.3 Resolving these issues requires public authorities, schools and communities to jointly plan actions tailored to local circumstances. Despite extensive publicity and promotion in England, only 2% of schools have a school travel plan. Research from 1999 suggests that the figure may be similar for Scotland. Until many more of the remaining 98% of schools introduce school travel plans, the problems highlighted in this review will continue. Community based approaches with safer routes to school initiatives are the most effective ways to ensure successful schemes and to build community ownership for the travel planning process. However, not all communities have the capacity to introduce and manage schemes and it is clear from the countries where mass adoption of these approaches have been achieved, that considerable support from national and local government is needed to encourage community leaders to take action.
5.4 Finally it must be of concern that very few of the positive features of school bus travel identified in the international research are reflected in the way buses are provided in Scotland. Eligibility for free travel is not clearly linked to need, buses and bus drivers do not reinforce positive messages about public transport, and current provision requires very substantial public funding. Bus travel to school needs to be re-invented as something for which children and parents can feel some ownership, rather than simply a transport mode of last resort or a free benefit.
5.5 There are opportunities within existing policy frameworks in Scotland for broadly based funding for school travel to deliver education, health, and transport policy aims. The UK and international experience highlighted in this review helps to show the way forward, but success will depend on programmes with a composition and focus reflecting Scottish circumstances. Over a generation, the experiences, expectations, and attitudes towards school travel for children, parents, and schools have changed in a largely unplanned direction. The research suggests that by planning better approaches through local communities, experiences, expectations and attitudes can be changed to make better use of everybody's time and resources.
Further Research Needs
5.6 In reviewing the research there were some obvious knowledge gaps as follows:
- If success relies upon galvanising community support then lessons for school travel planning need to be learned from successful community based schemes in both transport and non-transport sectors in Scotland. If the single most important target for school travel emerging from this review is to increase the number of community based safer routes to school schemes, then research is needed to understand why schemes are not being implemented more widely at present and to identify what needs to be done to change this.
- Further research is needed on the impacts of school travel experiences by each mode on children's development. The available research identifies significant impacts, but many of the studies have weak research designs or are now rather old. Given the distinctive nature of Scottish education, and the fact that many influences on travel to school lie within the control of Education Authorities, it is important that the impacts of school travel factors are understood at least as well as for other extra-curricular school facilitated activities.
- It has been noted that existing data sources do not permit as robust an analysis of outcomes as is needed, even on key issues such as safety and risk. A systematic analysis of where each of the initiatives in Table 3 has been applied in Scotland could provide transferable lessons about success and failure in various types of location, and amongst a variety of population groups.
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