SCHOOLHOOD’s third stop on its journey to safe, green and happy ways to school
„Planning action“– During the third quarter the SCHOOLHOODs team was eager to continue its work on the pathway to produce integrated actions plans for pushing safe, green and happy ways to school in our network cities! But there were a set of questions open that bothered us to make good selections for fitting actions. Most of them connected to the PEOPLE theme. In other words: how to work with behaviour change to address the main drivers of school mobility –parents and pupils.
With Line No. 1 – learning and exchange @ network level – SCHOOLHOODs engaged two experts to learn on behaviour change models and how to apply them. On webinar #3, we tackled one of the main challenges that our cities meet: how to achieve behavioural change with a focus on parents. For our webinar #4, a range of research that focused on children‘s travel investigating on transport modes, destinations and impacts on school performance was presented. One of our own, Dina Ravaglia from the City of Parma, presented her experiences in the field of mobility management on webinar #5.
With Line No 2 – putting things on the ground – The spotlight is on our partner city Brno, which made use of the European Mobility Week to run a game on going to school with sustainable means! Based on the Traffic Snake Game, the Brno team created an own game for pupils of the two SCHOOLHOODs pilot schools called “Sustainably to school with the Brno dragon”.
With Line No. 3 – what else is out there? – If you want to work on school mobility management, check the practice of the City of Graz, which runs a programme for mobility management actions in primary and secondary schools based on a catalogue of actions since 2011. Today, more than 1,300 school classes and 30,000 pupils took part. You can find more information in the recording of the SCHOOLHOODS webinar #4.
With Line No. 4 - creative work with methods and tools – During the September webinars, we got confronted with some findings by the research of Prof Friman that came as a surprise. Like:
the fact that children feel better when they do not have to travel.
that among the choice of actions that pupils do on their commute to school like reading, talking with friends or parents and using their smartphone, pupils who use their smartphones during their commute perform better at school compared to the others.
the distance of a commute to school is hardly a relevant factor for parents‘ modal choice on how their children go to school.
parents decide to drive their children to school based on their own needs and not and child-specific considerations, like health and school performance.
Take a look at the full Quarterly Network Report No. 3 and our second stop - vision, objectives & actions here!
Stay tuned!
Your SCHOOLHOODs team