An important message from the Smarter Travel team
Please can you extend an impassioned plea to your parents/carers. The council takes the safety of our children very seriously, there is no excuse for bad driving behaviour and there is no excuse for endangering the lives of children and families waiting to get into school.
We have heard from some schools describing some horrifying abusive behaviour towards teaching staff and our Civil Enforcement Officers. We are all aware of the government’s messages of social distancing, but this is not an excuse to drive children right up to the school gate. Having a congested street outside the school gate creates even less space for people to be able to distance from each other whilst waiting.
As the weather turns and with the onset of winter, we need to make sure our children can access the school safely, without the possibility of cars reversing into them or being left to negotiate a street full of cars when parents let them out in the middle of the road. We will be working with our Civil Enforcement Team and the Safer Neighbourhood Teams to ensure these messages and enforcement are delivered, but ask that you too are communicating with your parents and carers about the importance of a safe journey to school.
Please schools, can you include messages on your social media, parent mail and newsletters support this, there is no excuse for bad behaviour from parents driving to school. Safety on the journey to and from school is important and now, more than ever, we need our school streets to be safer and clearer of traffic.
There are a lot of schools asking for School Streets. We are looking at this and making sure our policies support the work we want to deliver. However, shutting a road to all traffic is a measure that requires a lot of planning and time. We would like our school streets to support a positive change to a safer space outside the schools, but we need parents to start thinking about different locations to park and stride to school to improve our school journeys first.
We are aware there are extenuating circumstances, where there is no alternative to driving, however most of our pupils do live within a 15 minute walking distance from their primary school. We urge you all to look at the activities on the STARs website, there are projects that are easy to incorporate into your subjects, Humanities, Science, PE, English and maths, as well as PSHE, we are more than happy to help too.