“The School Travel Health Check has provided an effective and powerful means of engaging with both schools and officers within the council. The dual aspect of health and environmental impact of the school journey has enabled the team to ensure that links are made to work in school, policy decisions and cross department priorities. The STHC is proving an ideal way to re-engage with schools to help monitor and review their travel plans, without asking them to undertake additional workloads. By showing schools that the STHC is complimentary to existing work within schools we hope to continue to address unnecessary car use and raise awareness of the benefits of sustainable travel.”
Sharon Payne
East of England Regional School Travel Adviser, DfE & DfT and Sustainable School Travel Strategy Officer, Suffolk County Council

As ex-local government & Sustrans officers ourselves we know:-

• what information tools are needed in order to actually make a difference at an individual school level, because that's where behaviour change needs to happen - think global, act local after all!


• it's hard enough as it is to affect social behaviour change in society, but it is even more difficult if you lack the necessary business-critical intelligence to tell you what's actually happening on the ground and where.


• it's hard enough as it is to provide a public service as a local government professional in this time of severe cut-backs, but we also know that it is even harder if you lack the robust evidence base that demonstrates to those allocating the budgets that what you are doing is making a real difference on the ground.

We have therefore continually developed and honed the STHC process over the last 10 years so that it:-

• quantifies and visualises where every pupil is travelling from and how far for each school, and therefore where the limited resources should be targeted to give a "fighting chance" of achieving modeshift.


• provides both the "big picture" required at the strategic planning level whilst still being detailed enough to enable resource targetting at the operational level.


• is of use to a wide range of local authority professional service providers - local transport planners, school admissions planners, school transport managers, sustainable travel coordinators, school estate planners & managers, child health professionals etc. - and so can enable effective joint working as all will be "singing from the same hymn sheet".


• is of use to both school management teams and teaching staff.


• will provide the robust evidence base to show what is changing at a local level if our spatial analysis is repeated every year.

The STHC can do all this because only spatial analysis provides the business-critical intelligence insight that is required, and this cannot ever be gained from simple "head counts" of pupils by hands up surveys or whatever on their own.

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“The School Travel Health Check process provides the essential foundations for development and delivery of Sustainable Modes Of Travel Strategies [SMOTS]. The STHC also frees officer time to do the important work of delivering change”
Emma Sheridan
Former London Regional School Travel Adviser for DfE & DfT and School Travel Manager, Transport for London and Modeshift Chair

First and foremost the STHC represents outstanding return on a very modest investment as exactly the same suite of STHC digital output can be used:-

• by the many different stakeholders with an interest in achieving modeshift to more active and sustainable modes of travel on the "school run" - professionals (local transport planners, school transport managers, sustainable travel coordinators, school estate planners & managers, child health professionals etc.), as well as the individual school communities (management teams, teachers, pupils, parents etc.).
  
  
• at a strategic level as an evidence base to inform future planning of services & infrastructure (eg. Sustainable Modes Of Travel Strategies SMOTS). Also by raising the profile of their work internally and externally with colleagues, managers and other stakeholders, potential joint working and funding opportunities may be identified.
  
  
• at an operational level to inform day-to-day targeting, prioritising & scheduling of professional resources, as well as providing those professionals with a tangible means of engaging with all schools in their LEA in a consistent and regular way that is both meaningful and constructive.
  
  
• as a starting point for further, more detailed analysis (spatial or otherwise) at the local level using in-house skills & resources.
  
  

By carrying out the analysis in exactly the same way for every pupil, in every school, in every client authority and adding in the spatial dimension, the STHC makes it possible for all interested parties to:-

• gain business-critical insight into the actual school travel situation on the ground that can only be derived by spatial analysis at individual pupil level in a way that simple "head counts" of pupils by mode will never be able to do.
  
  
• easily visualise and quantify the current school travel situation, for all schools at both a collective and individual level, over a prolonged period of time, in a consistent way, using interactive, online resources to get the perspective on it they need.
  
  
• engage simultaneously with all schools in the authority in a consistent, meaningful and constructive way (whether or not they actually collect pupil usual mode of travel or have a travel plan), using their own data.
  
  
• always compare "apples with apples" - whether these "apples" be age ranges, socio-demographics attributes, or the geographic location of both the schools and the pupils that may (or may not!) attend them. This is due to the straightforward nature of the spatial analysis - "as-the-crow-flies" - and the fact that we have results at an individual pupil level which can then be aggregated by any criteria required.
  
  

The main purpose of all this analysis however is not just to be clever for the sake of it, but to provide local authorities and school communities with quantitative, spatial intelligence data that will allow them to actually do something about making things better (think global, act local). The STHC analysis output gives them the ability to:-

• debate the issues around sustainable travel within the school community in a way informed by quantitative analysis of their own data rather than speculative presumption and tabloid style, “knee-jerk” reactions.
  
  
• arrive at their own assessment of the overall scale of the “school run” problem when compared with other LEAs or schools.
  
  
• identify where action needs to be taken, and then target resources and initiatives to those schools where they the most likely to achieve the best return for the limited available resource..
  
  
• set targets, ideally SMART* oness (*Sustainable, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound), for those initiatives to deliver in the short, medium and longer term:-
  
  
• short term quick wins include running awareness campaigns in schools identified as having the most number of pupils coming by car from within the walk threshold, to highlight the merits of walking or cycling.
  
  
• medium term outcomes could be identifying where pupils from a further distance could most easily be persuaded to walk or cycle in the future, perhaps once physical infrastructure has been put in place (eg. a footbridge bridge over a railway line or other barrier may suddenly make cycling / walking a viable option for pupils in a particular location that otherwise have to go by car due to the current journey distance / time).
  
  
• longer term outcomes could be assessing how well schools are currently situated to serve the current distribution of pupils, and where strategic changes could be made to reduce the overall total “pupil miles” travelled in the LEA.
  
  
• Benchmark and monitor how well these targets are being met. This will give an indication of how effectively initiatives are working to change things on the ground and may well unlock further funding to carry on the good work.
  
  
• If the analysis of the annual census data is repeated each year, clients will build up a robust evidence base to inform future strategy and funding.
  
  

See the main Purpose & Benefits section for more specific benefits of the STHC in the areas of Individual Schools, Sustainable Travel, Active Travel, SMART Target Setting, Transport Planning and Road Safety.

See the main Clients, Testimonials & Citations section for a map of STHC client authorities, their numerous testimonials about the STHC, and a list of citations of the STHC as an example of best practice in the sustainable / active literature.

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“I can say from experience that trying to do this work in-house, although theoretically possible, is in reality difficult, time consuming and costly. By using the STHC and packs for the schools we have saved months of work and achieved a better output.”
Albert Ward
School Travel Plan Team leader, Somerset County Council

The price of the STHC Service for a single census years data processing is set by our transparent pricing formula - £1,500 per LEA + £12 per school + £0.01 per pupil (exc. VAT) - with STHC School Packs costing an additional £26-28 per school depending on delivery options (either by clients themselves via their own internal post or directly by us). Thus client authorities will always know in advance how much our service is going to cost.

Client authorities are free to repeat the analysis the following year or not (although we would strongly recommend that they do). If they don't, there is a 10% annual charge based on the pricing formula for continued hosting of their portal and to remain part of the "STHC Club".

Our aim is to continually improve our service by encouraging feedback from client authorities and incorporating their suggestions into subsequent output wherever possible. All authorities that remain part of the "STHC Club" will be assured of automatically benefiting from these future improvements at no additional cost.

See the main Commissioning, Cost & Delivery section for more information about commisioning the STHC, our transparent pricing formula so you always know the cost of the STHC in advasnce, and the delivery mechanisms & timescales for the various STHC output components.

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“This work is a rarity, a product from a small consultancy that is motivated by a desire to achieve change and not just to make money. The output is excellent and does help to achieve change. Better still it comes at a very modest price that we cannot match in-house”
Kevin Speakman
School Travel Plans and SMOTS, North Somerset Council

The STHC service is managed and delivered by Knowledge Mappers Ltd., a small but dedicated consultancy company (along with a network of associates) made up of ex-local authority and Sustrans officers with over 70 collective man-years of experience in the fields of spatial analysis, environmental science, local authority data and delivering sustainable travel solutions. All are committed to delivering lasting change in the field of active & sustainable travel.

Knowledge Mappers is registered with the UK Information Commissioner (our registration number is Z1303712).

See STHC co-founder and Knowledge Mappers founder and CEO Angus McDonalds profile on LinkedIn.

See STHC co-founder and Andrew Combes & Associates founder and CEO Andrew Combes profile on LinkedIn

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This is an extract of the data about individual pupils that is recorded by the school on its information management system and collected as part of the official National School Census by the local education authority on behalf of central government.

• Why We Need It
• What We Need

We therefore require the following data fields for each pupil in the "Pupil-Level" School Census Data extract supplied to us (see section 2.4 of STHC Guide 2 - Client Input Data for a full discussion about each):-

• Unique Identifier
• LEA Code
• Home Postcode
• Actual School DfE Establishment Number
• National Curriculum Year (NCY)
• Gender
• Free School Meal Entitlement
• Ethnicity Code

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This is the data about how individual pupils usually travel to school. In England between 2005 and 2011 it was recorded by schools on thier information management system and collected as part of the official National School Census by the local education authority on behalf of central government. Since the English Department for Education unilaterally decided to stop collecting it as part of the national census in 2011, it has been up to each local authority, and individual school in the case of academies, as to whether or not to continue collecting the data from pupils and how it is recorded.

• Before We Begin, A Word Of About Individual Pupil Usual Mode Of Travel Data
• Why We Need It
• What We Need

On the 29th July 2011 the English Department for Education announced that, in order to “reduce bureaucracy”, Pupil Usual Mode of Travel had been immediately dropped as a data field from the English National School Census (see the full story in this part of the website). Although they couldn't stop schools and local authorities from still collecting the data (and there is no technical reason why they can't as the Mode Of Travel data field remains an operational field in schools information management system software), many took this as a their cue and stopped doing so.

However despite the resultant increase in bureaucracy to themselves, many authorities have made the necessary, alternative arrangements to collect pupil mode of travel data directly from all their schools on an individual basis, academies as well as ones still under their control. They have done this because they appreciate the value of continuing to have an authority-wide view of how pupils travel to school for transport planning and many other purposes.

We therefore continue to offer the School Travel Health Check Service to all UK local authorities. Indeed as is our custom we have adapted and improved the robustness of the STHC process:-

• Lack of Pupil Usual Mode of Travel Data from some / all schools in an authority does not prevent us undertaking spatial analysis of the "Pupil-Level" School Census Data (and never has done). All we need to do that is the pupils home postcode, and that will always be collected as part of the School Census.


• This means we can still plot all pupils on a map, and therefore all schools can still visualise where all their pupils are travelling from on the School Map & Charts page on the authorities STHC data Portal. It has always been the case with the STHC that pupils with no recorded mode of travel have been coded as "Unknown (UNK)", and assigned the "Unknown" symbol on the map.


• This means authorities can still engage simultaneously with all the schools in "their patch" in a consistent, meaningful and constructive way using their own data, irrespective of whether or not they still collect pupil mode of travel data or have a school travel plan.


• Although the resulting analysis output is less rich without the results being broken down by individual pupil mode of travel, it still contains much useful information of value to local authorities that can be used to profile the pupil travel situation in individual schools eg. total and average "actual" travel distance.Thus authorities will still be able to identify the ones where active engagement would potentially yield the best results.


• That said we can easily "plug in" alternative sources of pupil travel mode data if they are available, even if it is only at whole school-level rather than individual pupil level. For example the Sustrans Hands Up Survey in Scotland or the ModeShift Stars Survey in the rest of the UK. Although not ideal and a bit of a "half-way house", these can still be "mashed up" with the pupil maps obtained by spatial analysis of the "Pupil-Level" School Census Data in the portal for great visualisation and at least some quantification.

Thus whilst not exactly "business as usual", the STHC is still here for those local authorities that appreciate the value of having an authority-wide view of how pupils travel to school. We do appreciate however that during the transition process between collecting regimes, the situation within an authority may be patchy and confused. All we ask is that, when providing their Input Data to us, clients are clear about its completeness and let us know what schools (if any) are missing from it. This will save any unnecessary delay in processing due to data failing initial quality control checks!

STHC Briefing Paper On The Sudden Announcement By DfE That The Pupil’s Usual Mode Of Travel Field Is No Longer To Be Collected As Part Of The School Census (2nd August 2011)

This paper contains the “facts” of the matter around the announcement as far as could be gleaned from the DfE website at the time, and was the basis for the ModeShift briefing paper sent round the school travel community. The hope was that it contained enough background information, direct quotes and points of contact to enable all the stakeholders who currently benefit from the collection of mode of travel data through National School Census to successfully engage with officials within DfE, and the relevant Minister For Schools (one Nick Gibb, MP for Bognor Regis in West Sussex), to get this decision reversed.

According to DfE officials these changes were all happening at the insistence of the minister, which presumably is why they had been implemented unilaterally, without any exteranl consultation with the local authority active and sustainable travel community, and against long established departmental procedures controlling changes to the contents of the School Census (ie. the so called "Star Chamber Scrutiny Board").

Click here to download the STHC Briefing Paper document (.pdf, 0.1 MB).

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Given the patchy and chaotic situation around the collection of pupil usual mode of travel data from schools, even within a single local authority, the simplest approach is for us just to say to clients "tell us what you have got and we'll take it from there".

The Pupil Usual Mode of Travel data values currently reported in the STHC output are those that were defined by the Department for Education when it was collected as part of the National School Census from 2006 - 2011. These are summarised in the table below:-

Mode of Travel	STHC Code	STHC Symbol
Walk	WLK
Cycle	CYC
Car or Van	CAR
Car Share	CRS
Public Service Bus	PSB
Dedicated School Bus	DSB
Bus Type Not Known	BNK
Taxi	TXI
Train	TRN
Metro / Tram / Light Rail	MTL
London Underground	LUL
Other	OTH
Unknown	UNK

These are (and have always been in our humble opinion :-) deficient in several ways:-

• They are too London-centric (eg. there are separate codes for "Metro/Light Rail" (MTL), "London Underground" (LUL) and "National Rail" (TRN)), and do not fully reflect the mix of travel modes used by pupils across the country - for example there are no codes for travelling by "Scooter" or "Ferry".


• There are also no codes for "Park & Stride" or "Ride & Stride", which means that the data cannot track positive changes in travel habits happening within a school after such enabling intervention schemes have been put in place.

However they were at least a national standard at one point so if that is what you are still collecting, then of course we will be happy to use it. Please just make sure that the data you send us contains the pupil UPRN so we can cross-reference it with your "Pupil-Level" School Census data.

If on the other hand you have already switched to alternative data schemes such as the Modeshift STARS scheme, or you are a Scottish local authority and you participate in the Sustrans Hands Up Survey in Scotland, we will also be happy to adapt the STHC to the revised modes of travel used in those surveys. However remember these surveys only collect data at school-level, so there is a compromise as to how data can be shown on the portal.

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This is an extract of the data about individual pupils that is recorded by the school on its information management system and collected as part of the official National School Census by the local education authority on behalf of central government.

• Why We Need It
• What We Need
• A Word Of Caution About School Gazetteer Files

We therefore require the following data fields for each school in the "School-Level" School Census Data extract supplied to us (see section 3.4 of STHC Guide 2 - Client Input Data for a full discussion about each):-

• School Name
• LEA Code
• DfE Establishment Number
• School Type (DfE Census School Type Code and/or LEA-Specific School Type)
• School Phase of Education (PoE)
• National Curriculum Year (NCY) Range (Minimum NCY Year Group and Maximum NCY Year Group in separate fields)
• Ordnance Survey Grid Reference (Easting & Northing in separate fields - see above)
• School Postal Address
• School Telephone Number
• School Email Address
• School Website Address
• Intake Type
• Free School Meals Taken
• Number of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) Staff
• LEA-specific Unique School ID (if routinely used)

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The Ordnance Survey (OS) supplies UK local authorities with various topographic mapping and other geospatial datatsets under 2 public sector mapping agreements:-

• Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) - England and Wales
• One Scotland Mapping Agreement (OSMA) - Scotland

Thus there is no additional cost to local authorities for us using Ordnance Survey data on their behalf.

• Why We Need It
• What We Need
• Initial Supply Administration Process (1st Year Only)

The good news is that as we are now part of the Ordnance Surveys Multi-Client Contractors Scheme, which means that they automatically supply us with national coverage of all the OS datasets we need. Thus local authority clients no longer need to physically send us their Ordnance Survey data.

For reference the OS datasets we use include:-

• CodePoint - contains the grid references of the centroid of each unit postcode in the UK, as well useful “look-up” information about them such as which local authority, NHS area, parliamentary constituency etc. they are in.


• BoundaryLine - contains the definitive administrative and political boundaries for Great Britain down to electoral ward level.


• OS Topographic (Base) Mapping – Various scales are required as background imagery on any results maps we produce such as those in the STHC School Packs:-
  • OS 1:10,000 Colour raster
  • OS 1:50,000 Colour raster
  • OS 1:250,000 Colour raster

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The bad news (well not that bad) is that we will still need to sign a Contractors Agreement issued by your authority in order to use the OS data we have on your behalf. However the good news here is that it is a standard contract document and it should be readily available from your Authority Liaison Officer (ALO), the person responsible for managing the digital map data supplied to the authority under the Public Service Mapping Agreement (PSMA) (and incidentally a very useful person to know anyway if you are undertaking any sort of mapping work). This can be emailed to us to sign and email (or post) back to you by return.

The even better news is that this only needs to be done once, the first year we undertake the STHC analysis. Thus after the initial set up process, clients do not need to do anything else with regards to supplying us with Ordnance Survey datasets so this administrative requirement needn’t delay any other aspect of the processing.

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This is the high quality aerial imagery that local authorities usually commission for "thier patch" every few years or so. Aerial photography is usually covered by a separate, unrelated license agreement to that for the Ordnance Survey mapping data as it will have been supplied by a specialist aerial imagery company, such as GetMapping or BlueSky. Thus we can only get it direct from the authority.

• Why We Need It
• What We Need

We need the latest available digital aerial photography files for the authority. Note however that, due to the expense, authority-wide aerial photography is usually only commissioned / acquired every few years. For example it may be tied in with National Census collection ie. 1991, 2001, 2011 etc. Thus even the most recently acquired imagery may not show newly built features that are on the Ordnance Survey map. We can only use what you’ve got, but as long as users are made aware of the date the imagery was taken they can make allowances for this!

In terms of internal contacts, there are usually 2 ports of call for any mapping / aerial photography requirements within an authority, depending on the internal digital mapping / GIS setup:-

• Authority Liaison Officer (ALO) - This is the named officer in each local authority responsible for the receipt, management and internal distribution of all digital data supplied under the PSMA. Thus they are the ultimate source for the digital mapping data we require. Incidentally this is also true for everybody in the authority so, if you are new to the world of digital mapping and GIS, the ALO is a good person to speak to initially to find out who is doing what and therefore might be interested in the STHC analysis output. However how the ALO function is carried out varies greatly between authorities in terms of whom the person is, their technical experience, seniority and time available to devote to the role. This may mean that the actual day-to-day, hands-on management of the MSA data may be delegated elsewhere, which is where source #2 comes in.


• Authority GIS Team - If the authority has a dedicated, corporate GIS Team then they will probably be the people that actually give us the digital aerial photography files we require. Again they are worth making contact with anyway as they will probably be:-
  • interested in the output analysis data we will eventually supply back to you.
  • involved at a technical level in enabling Clients to visualise the GIS data we send them, either using the corporate GIS setup, perhaps via their intranet, or stand-alone software installed on their computer.

Note
Due to the large size of the digital aerial photography files, especially for authority-wide coverage (we’re talking 100s of megabytes), we will need to sort out the logistics of obtaining the data directly with your GIS Team. Normally we would send them a portable hard drive for them to transfer the data onto and post back to us to save them the hassle of having to write it onto multiple data disks.

As the aerial photography is supplied under a different licensing agreement than the Ordnance Survey data, authorities must check that the terms and conditions of use enable them to supply us with the data in order to produce paper maps on their behalf. They will also need to supply us with the correct copyright acknowledgement statement to include on the paper maps we produce.

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The following form the foundation of our spatial analysis process. From these, all other things flow ...

• "Pupil Home – 'Actual' School Distance" Analysis
• “Pupils Living Within Walk Threshold" Analysis
• “Pupil Home – 'Nearest' School Distance” Analysis

Once spatial analysis has told us where all the pupils are coming from, how far and by what means they are travelling and where they are travelling to, we can calculate:-

• the total distance travelled to school and back by all pupils on a daily basis for all recorded modes.


• the average distance travelled by particular modes.


• the distance within which the "majority" of pupils live from their school. (Rather than simply being "more than half", traffic and transport engineers strictly define the "majority" as the 85th percentile ie. the distance within which 85% of the pupils travel).


• the number of pupils that live within a realistic walking distance of their school (800m (0.5 miles) for primary, 2km (1.2 miles) for secondary)....


• ....as well as the number of those pupils who nonetheless still travel to school by car rather than walk or cycle.


• the minimum possible total travel distances given the current geographic distribution of the pupil population and the schools that serve them.


• an overall travel carbon footprint for all pupil journeys to school by vehicular modes of travel, and the number of calories burned through walking and cycling journeys.

What's more ...

• if you can calculate these for one school day then you can calculate them for a school week (5 days) and a school year (190 days).


• if you repeat the analysis in exactly the same way for every pupil, in every school in every client authority, then you can directly compare “apples with apples”.


• if you repeat the analysis in exactly the same way every year, then you can see if there is any change over time (as well of course actually visualising and quantifying the change).

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The following factors are used in our subsequent calculations to create the STHC analysis output:-

• Vehicular Travel Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) Emission Calculation Factors
• Calories Burned Calculation Factors For Walking and Cycling
• Overall STHC Sustainable Travel ("RAG") Ratings For Schools

These are based on the official UK government greenhouse gas conversion factors, first calculated by DEFRA (the UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) in 2007 as follows:-

Mode of Travel	CO2 Emission Factor Per km	Reference
Car / Van (CAR)* Taxi (TXI)*	0.2042 kg CO2/vehicular km converted to 0.2042 kg CO2/passenger km	Table 6 – Combined average for petrol & diesel cars
Car Share (CRS)*	0.2042 kg CO2/vehicular km converted to 0.1021 kg CO2/passenger km	Table 6 – Combined average for petrol & diesel cars
Public Service Bus (PSB) Dedicated School Bus (DSB) Bus Type Not Known (BNK)	0.0891 kg CO2/passenger km	Table 8 – Bus
Train (TRN)	0.0602 kg CO2/passenger km	Table 8 – National rail
Metro/Tram/Light Rail (MTL)	0.0650 kg CO2/passenger km	Table 8 – Light rail & tram
London Underground (LUL)	0.0526 kg CO2/passenger km	Table 8 – London Underground

Source: “Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors For Company Reporting”, DEFRA (2007). (URL: www.ukconversionfactorscarbonsmart.co.uk/)

Notes:-

2. Evolution Of Calculation Factors Over Time - DEFRA first published an official list of emission factors in 2007, which was the same time as the STHC was being launched as a generally available service to all local authorities. Thus we adopted the DEFRA figures to calculate the school travel carbon footprints for the STHC. Since then however DEFRA have revised the figures just about every year as the science behind determining and measuring all the individual factors involved in greenhouse gas emmissions has improved.
With each revision however the calculation of the factors has become more complex, and not every factor is revised each time. To keep things simple therefore, and to enable "like-for-like" comparison between analysis years, we have continued to use the original 2007 figure in our STHC carbon footprint calculations.
Rather than just treating this as an exercise in arithmetic, perhaps you would like to delve further into this whole issue and see what difference these revisions make to the calculated carbon footprint figure for your school. Unfortunately pre-2013 carbon conversion factors are no longer available on the DEFRA website and do not appear to have made into the official government web archive. Thus for the sake of continuity you can click on the following links to download each revision of the official figures from our archive instead - 2007, 2008, 2009 , 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.

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These are based on the work of Roger Mackett, a professor of Transport Studies at University College London and one of the UKs’ leading researchers into the role of travel as a facilitator for children’s health:-

Mode of Travel	Average Speed	Calorie Burn Rate	Calories Burned Per Km
Walk (WLK)	3.2 km/hour	1.85 cal/min	34.69 cal/km
Cycle (CYC)	16 km/hour	1.4 cal/min	5.25 cal/km

Mode of Travel	Average Speed	Calorie Burn Rate	Calories Burned Per Km
Walk (WLK)	3.2 km/hour	2.85 cal/min	53.44 cal/km
Cycle (CYC)	16 km/hour	2.15 cal/min	8.06 cal/km

Source: "The therapeutic value of children’s everyday travel" - Mackett, R.L., Lucas, L, Paskins, J. and Turbin, J. (2004). (URL: http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/1421/)

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To help schools and school travel professionals get an immediate indication of how an individual school compares to the others in the authority in terms of sustainable school travel, as well as giving them a start on setting SMART (Sustainable, Measurable, Attainable, Reasonable & Time-bound) targets to do something about it, we devised a simple traffic light system (ie. results coded as either "Red", "Amber" or "Green") of STHC Sustainable School Travel Indicators:-

• Number Pupils Within a Realistic Walk Threshold Coming by Car" - is the short term indicator in that it is something that can be immediately tackled by the school itself if it put its mind to it with the help of the school travel professionals - awareness raising campaigns like Walk Once a Week (WOW), "Park & Stride" schemes, better cycling / pedestrian infrastructure etc. It is also a concept that everybody can understand ("why are they not walking when it's such a short distance?"), and therefore buy into the idea of tackling. From our point of view it also is something that can be easily and consistently measured, and so it is obvious if progress is being made in tackling the issue or not.


• Amount of CO₂ Per Pupil Travel Emissions Compared To The Authority Average - is a longer term indicator because, although the concept is fairly easy to understand - the further you drive the more CO₂ is produced - tackling the issue is not so straight forward and there is no single, easily understood target that everybody can immediately work towards. Any progress will require sustained action over a longer period of time. From our point of view it also is something that is more difficult to measure.

These indicators were devised in consultation with client authorities when the School Travel Health Check service first started. We started out with just the CO₂ indicator but it soon became clear that there are some contributing factors that are beyond a schools control, and therefore this would undermine any efforts to make any progress on improving sustainable school travel if this was the only measure of progress. For example the geographic fact that a school is rural often dictates that pupils will have to travel a greater distance and from a wider catchment area where a car or school bus are the only available options, which will result in a larger carbon footprint per pupil for the school journey (= Amber or Red Long Term Indicator). There is very little a school can do to change this reality, but this shouldn't stop them from raising awareness on the issue within their school community and working towards goals that are meaningful to them.

However it is also clear that indicators cannot tell the full story in isolation and need to be considered in conjunction with other data. For example for our same rural school it is often the case that there are very few (if any) pupils living within the walk threshold and so it would probably get a Green Short Term Indicator. However we've already seen that pupils will come from further away so the carbon footprint will be higher, but even this is not straightforward. Intuition dictates that it would be better if the pupils were travelling by bus but what if most of them were being bussed in from a considerable distance away, perhaps from the edge of the nearest large settlement, to boost school numbers? Is that better than kids travelling by car on a more individual basis from a much shorter distance?

We are continually consulting with out clients and the wider school travel community on how our indicators could be improved to help schools work towards more sustainable travel.

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The STHC analysis results calculated for each individual pupil are aggregated (”sliced and diced”) in different ways for reporting purposes:-

• Individual School - All results for a school are reported in the same place. The school is selected from the drop-down list at the top of the page and the contents - bar charts, line charts, tables & maps - will update accordingly. You can only view one school at a time, but there is nothing to stop users opening up the pages in another browser window so schools could be compared side by side.


• All-Schools - Key results for all individual schools in the authority are reported side-by-side, enabling direct comparison between them. These are presented as interactive tables or a Geostatistical Atlas of maps, charts & tables that can be ranked from highest to lowest for a variety of criteria so you can see how a given school compares to the others.


• Whole Authority (LA) - Results of all individual school are aggregated together to give a "whole authority" figure.

Pages are also organised by the number of years of analysis results they contain:-

• Latest Year -The most recent year of results only.


• All Years - Results for all the years we have undertaken the STHC analysis for the authority. Note the interactive maps pages are only available for the latest year.

These are presented:-

• At a range of geographic levels:-
  • Pan-Regional (if appropriate)
  • Pan-LEA
  • Individual School


• By national curriculum year:-
  • aggregated into generic school types (primary, secondary, sixth form)
  • by individual year group
  
  
• Showing change over time

By adding in the spatial dimension to the mix it means that, in addition to the age range of the pupils (ie. primary, secondary etc.) and their socio-demographics (eg. gender, ethnicity, free school meal entitlement erc.), the results of the STHC analysis can also be reported (ie. "sliced-and-diced") in terms of all sorts of geographies such as:-

• electoral areas such as local authority wards or national parliamentary constituencies


• health board areas


• census output areas (both medium and super output areas)

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Making the analysis output easily available to schools, either via the STHC Data Portal or the paper STHC School Pack, has always been a fundamental principal of the School Travel Health Check. It completes the circle and puts the analysis results back into the place where the source data came from in the first place. It also makes logical sense as the school and the wider school community is where we actually want to effect the behaviour change to more active and sustainable modes of travel.

When schools are exposed to the STHC analysis output:-

• they can see there is a point to collecting pupil usual mode of travel data in the first place as it is actually being used for something useful. And not just useful in the grand scheme of things, but actually something that they can use themselves for both teaching and managing.


• any glaring errors in the source data, such as the miscoding of pupils walking 10 miles round trip a day instead of coming by car, have a better chance of being picked up and corrected before the next round of data collection.


• if the school wishes to start engaging with school travel initiatives, the STHC will give them an initial baseline to work from in the first year of analysis.


• if the school is already actively engaged, the STHC will provide some indication as to the effectiveness of ongoing inititiatives since the previous analysis.


• all schools are naturally "spurred on to do better” when they see their results in comparison with the previous year (or their neighbours!).

Perhaps most importantly though the STHC analysis output gives schools the ability to have an informed debate about the issues around active and sustainable travel within the school community based on the quantitative analysis of their own data rather than speculative presumption and tabloid style, “knee-jerk” reactions. They can still do this whether or not they currently have a travel plan or even collect pupil usual mode of travel data, or are in any other way engaged with the sutaianable / active travel agenda. They can then arrive at their own assessment of the overall scale of the “school run” problem at their school, especially when they can compare themselves with other schools in their authority.

This means that local authority sustainable / active travel teams can engage simultaneously with all schools in the authority in a consistent, meaningful and constructive way. And likewise any schools can inititate engagement with the them, prompted and guided by the STHC output that they have been exposed to. Both will then have something definite and tangible to talk about.

“The School Travel Health Check has provided an effective and powerful means of engaging with both schools and officers within the council. The dual aspect of health and environmental impact of the school journey has enabled the team to ensure that links are made to work in school, policy decisions and cross department priorities. The STHC is proving an ideal way to re-engage with schools to help monitor and review their travel plans, without asking them to undertake additional workloads. By showing schools that the STHC is complimentary to existing work within schools we hope to continue to address unnecessary car use and raise awareness of the benefits of sustainable travel.”
Sharon Payne
East of England Regional School Travel Adviser, DfE & DfT and Sustainable School Travel Strategy Officer, Suffolk County Council
Suffolk County Council first commissioned the STHC analysis data for their 2008-09 school census data. They also commissioned us to produce our STHC Paper Packs on a pilot basis for a selected number of schools. As these were successfully received the plan is to roll them out to all (344) Suffolk LEA-controlled schools next year, as well use them as the foundation for formal lessons plans being drawn up for various Key Stages in different areas of the curriculum.

“I have just received our map / aerial photo and information. I just wanted to say that this is a brilliant piece of work by you, and is extremely helpful to me. Many thanks, and keep up the good work!”
Trevor Jameson
Headteacher, St. George's Primary School, Portland

“Great to have some measurable targets / data to use to set future targets and develop the travel plan. Fantastic maps.”
Headteacher
Heyeswood First School, Dorset

“Fascinating detailed information, well displayed, very visual. Will use alongside STP at next review.”
Headteacher
St Josephs School, Christchurch
In October 2009 eleven LEA run schools in Dorset received our STHC School Packs for the very first time. Above is some of the feedback received by the Dorset County Council Sustainable Travel Coordinator.

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Sustainable Travel has always been at the heart of the STHC, which is the very embodiement of the "Think global, Act local!" philosophy. It chunks down the whole global warming / climate change debate so that it becomes a local issue that individuals and school communities can get a handle on and "do something about". Or, at the very least, it enables them to have an informed debate about whether or not they should be doing something about it.

However there are those that are still of the opinion that global warming isn't an issue, and therefore the environemntal sustainability of personal travel choices isn't important, certainly not important enough to spend tax payers money on anyway..... Well everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but no matter what the prevailing thought is, the beauty of the STHC is that the same spatial analysis results can be used to inform both strategy and operations in so many areas of public policy and service delivery, irespective of why it was originally collected. Public health, local transport planning, road safety, schools estate planning as well as sustainable travel, all benefit from spatial analysis of how far and by what means pupils travel to school.

“Just to acknowledge receipt [of the final STHC data pack] - Our sustainable school travel forum is most impressed with you work - Brilliant!”
Phil Cornsih
School Travel Awareness Officer, Torbay Council
Torbay have commissioned the STHC since 2007-08, and have been distributing our STHC Packs to schools since 2008-09.

“The School Travel Health Check process provides the essential foundations for development and delivery of Sustainable Modes Of Travel Strategies [SMOTS]. The STHC also frees officer time to do the important work of delivering change”
Emma Sheridan
Former London Regional School Travel Adviser for DfE & DfT and School Travel Manager, Transport for London and Modeshift Chair
Transport for London commissioned the STHC on behalf of 8 London Borough Councils on a pilot basis. Modeshift is the central forum supporting those who are working to achieve shift towards more sustainable and active travel for young people and school communities in the UK.

“The savings in cost and time that the STHC and the packs for schools bring is considerable. It has freed my time to use the STHC output to work toward the strategic change that the STHC identifies.”
Ian Selby
School Travel Plans and SMOTS, Bournemouth Borough Council
Bournemouth first commissioned the STHC analysis for their 2007-08 school census data and so are part of the core of SW authorities that has contributed to its rapid development over the last year. They also commissioned STHC Paper Packs for the first time for 2008-09.

“This work is a rarity, a product from a small consultancy that is motivated by a desire to achieve change and not just to make money. The output is excellent and does help to achieve change. Better still it comes at a very modest price that we cannot match in-house”
Kevin Speakman
School Travel Plans and SMOTS, North Somersetl
North Somerset also first commissioned the STHC analysis for their 2007-08 school census data but have also taken the STHC Paper Packs for all their schools from the start.

Towards A School Carbon Management Plan
Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) and the Department For Children, Schools & Families (DCSF) (June 2009)
In June 2009 the SDC and the DCSF jointly published this consultation document. In Section D covering Reducing emissions from school travel and transport, Dorset County Councils use of the STHC is the only example cited of the best use of existing data to inform individual schools of their performance and to identify actions.

“School Travel Plans are only as good as the data on which they are developed. Establishing better quality data sources to underpin School Travel Plans could help schools and School Travel Advisors to target their activities more effectively.

It could also provide a basis for more consistent monitoring (for example, establishing a consistent method of measuring the impact of schemes, benchmarking of activities and comparison of schools and local authorities).

Improved school travel data can also link into local authority work on National Indicator 186 (Per Capita Carbon Emissions in the local authority area). In particular, it can help local authorities to better understand the impact of school travel and the opportunities for interventions.

Existing data sources can be better used (as evidenced by the Dorset County Council [STHC] case study). It is important that Regional and Local School Travel Advisers understand the data that is available to them and how it can be used and interpreted. Existing data can also be used to inform individual schools of their performance and to identify actions.”

Download the full document from our website here (.pdf, 0.4 MB).

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According to the UK Government Chief Medical Officer, active travel to school:-

• improves levels of physical activity.
• reduces carbon emissions.
• can help set good exercise habits in early years.
• can help combat the epidemic of childhood and adult obesity.

So how can better value from investment in promoting active travel to school be achieved? Well according to Promoting Active Travel to School: Progress and Potential, it can be achieved by:-

• Using smarter information about travel patterns to and from schools, such as provided by the School Travel Health Check.


• Identifying and supporting schools with the most potential for change (i.e. where there are relatively large numbers of young people not walking or cycling within the walking threshold).


• Recognising and highlighting the economic value associated with the shift from car to walk and cycle. Current estimates place an annual £600 return (much of this made up by short and long term health gains) for each pupil making the shift from car to walk or cycle.*
  *Value for Money: An Economic Assessment of Investment in Walking and Cycling. Dr A Davis, Department of Health-South West, 2010


• Providing information for prospective parents about the benefits and potential of active travel before decisions on selecting schools are made to encourage a reduction in the number of “child miles” travelled for the school journey.


• Ensuring schools continue to feel supported to change the travel behaviour of their young people.


• Working jointly to promote active travel to school enables a more efficient approach to tackling transport and health issues.

“The connection between physical activity and good health is very clear. Children in particular need to get back to the levels of walking and cycling that prevailed in their parents’ time if we are to reduce the risk of obesity. The School Travel Health Check is, in my opinion, an invaluable tool for all those interested in improving the health and wellbeing of children. It provides such crucial information that I don't see how we can do without it.
If we want to get rates of cycling and walking up to the levels of the best European communities we need to use this data to make sure our transport plans will make that happen. If we fail to take maximum advantage of this opportunity, we may fail our children.”
Dr Gabriel Scally
Regional Director of Public Health for the South West

Soft Measures – Hard Facts: The Value For Money Of Transport Measures Which Change Travel Behaviour. A Review Of The Evidence
Department of Health / Highways Agency / NHS South West / Travelwise / South West Regional Development Agency (January 2011)
The STHC is cited throughout this review document as the essential evidence base to guide and support intervention on active travel to school.

“This innovative sustainable development initiative aims to provide robust data that will allow schools, planners and individuals to develop more sustainable school travel options.”

“Active travel to school is an important source of physical activity for young people. It could be increased further. These statistics provide a useful baseline against which to measure progress, and should be used in conjunction with a qualitative assessment of local authority and school travel policies.

"The value of each additional young person walking to school has been estimated as £768 from health, less congestion and carbon savings." (p33)

Download the full document from our website here (.pdf, 2.6 MB).

Promoting Active Travel to School: Progress and Potential
Modeshift / Department of Health / NHS South West (November 2010)
The STHC is cited throughout this briefing paper produced to answer the main questions health professionals often ask about promoting active travel to school:-

• How far can young people reasonably be expected to walk or cycle to school?
• Is any progress being made to get more young people active by promoting walking or cycling to school?
• What is the potential for encouraging more young people to walk or cycle to school?
• What can be done to get better value for money?

“One successful way of presenting data at the school and young person level is to use the School Travel Health Check (STHC). This takes the School Census Data and processes it to produce school friendly maps, spreadsheets and reports which give a clear indication of the facts from which individuals, schools and policy makers can decide what to do.”

Download the full document from our website here (.pdf, 0.5 MB).

2009 Annual Report
UK Government Chief Medical Officer
The STHC is cited as the example of best practice for public health in the South West Region in the 2009 Annual Report of the UK Government Chief Medical Officer (see "Increasing active travel by schoolchildren" - p73).

"The synergies between improving health and slowing climate change should be championed by the Government and health leaders to drive bold lifestyle changes." [Recommended Action]

“This innovative sustainable development initiative aims to provide robust data that will allow schools, planners and individuals to develop more sustainable school travel options.”

“Active travel to school is an important source of physical activity for young people. It could be increased further. These statistics provide a useful baseline against which to measure progress, and should be used in conjunction with a qualitative assessment of local authority and school travel policies.”

Download the full document from our website here (.pdf, 3.6 MB).

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There’s no point in setting targets for change if they aren't:-

• Sustainable
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

The sections below show how the STHC can be used to set SMART targets for the Short, Medium and Longer term.:-

• Short Term SMART Targets
• Medium Term SMART Targets
• Longer Term SMART Targets

The STHC provides a wealth of detailed travel pattern data at a local level that will greatly inform the creation for local transport plans (LPTs).

“It was extremely informative to go through the range of [STHC] analysis for the schools in South East Dorset. It provided a lot of 'food for thought' for us in the development of the transport strategies for the South East Dorset area to 2026.”

“We have had to prepare the transport model from scratch and have therefore been involved in an extensive and expensive data collection programme in order to assemble a comprehensive picture of travel patterns and behaviour across South East Dorset. We were therefore delighted to learn about the journey to school data which provided a fully observed picture of travel to school by the variety of modes. The journey to school data was particularly useful in filling in gaps in the travel demand matrices for journeys by private car and public transport. The level of detail and the comprehensive nature of the data meant that it was an ideal basis to supplement the other sources of data.”

“The Journey to school data was vital for us to be able to fill in the gaps between the different roadside interview sites. In other studies we have had to make simplifying assumptions about travel between the interview sites; to be able to use the Journey to School database was a real bonus for us.”
Robert Thompson
Business Manager Policy and Plans, Atkins Transport Planning
STHC data was supplied to Atkins, who were commissioned by Dorset County Council to undertake the South East Dorset Multi Modal Study (underpins LTP3 and MAA).

Soft Measures – Hard Facts: The Value For Money Of Transport Measures Which Change Travel Behaviour. A Review Of The Evidence
Department of Health / Highways Agency / NHS South West / Travelwise / South West Regional Development Agency (January 2011)
The STHC is cited throughout this review document as the essential evidence base to guide and support intervention on active travel to school.

“This innovative sustainable development initiative aims to provide robust data that will allow schools, planners and individuals to develop more sustainable school travel options.”

“Active travel to school is an important source of physical activity for young people. It could be increased further. These statistics provide a useful baseline against which to measure progress, and should be used in conjunction with a qualitative assessment of local authority and school travel policies.

"The value of each additional young person walking to school has been estimated as £768 from health, less congestion and carbon savings." (p33)

Download the full document from our website here (.pdf, 2.6 MB).

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The STHC has always been useful for road safety in schools because it:-

• informs school travel plans, which in turn inform traffic management strategies outside the school gates, which in turn hopefully reduces the number of accidents.


• initiates and informs discussion in the school community around travelling to school, which can't help but include issues around ensuring personal safety, especially when walking or cycling.

However Our Road Traffic Accident (STATS 19) Data Analysis module, with its ability to visualise and quantify all the officially reported road traffic accidents within 4.8 km of any school going back to 2005, is a complete "game changer" for road safety in schools.

It can be produced for any / all school(s) in any authority in the country, whether or not they are already involved in the Pupil Travel Distance & Mode Analysis aspect of the STHC. This is because it uses free and publicly available national data (the official police STATS19 accident data).

However the power of the portal approach is that once data is incorporated into it, no matter in what initial context, it can be re-purposed for use elsewhere, in conjunction with other data it may not have been "mashed up" with before. For example in the screenshot map opposite you can see the individual STATS19 accident points within the defined distance from the school displayed alongside a "heat map" of the pupils attending the school.

The aim is always to make the sum of the whole information resource very much greater than the sum of the individual datasets from which it is made.

“Thanks for getting the data to us for our use to establish a priority list for our safer routes to school and for targeting schools for further action....”

“We've been really impressed with the STHC here in Sandwell. We have most of our schools with travel plans already, so this information will be invaluable for us to take the Travelling to School Initiative to the next level by actually achieving mode shift! Hopefully being able to easily target schools with the biggest potential for mode shift we should be able to get some real results.”
Fleur Tooby
School Travel Adviser, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council
Sandwell were the first authority in the West Midlands region to commission the STHC in 2008-09, where it is being used very effectively at a day-to-day operational level.

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In this section we discuss the School Travel Health Check commissioning process:-

• Individual Schools
• Local Authorities
• Joint Working

Comissioning of the STHC is usually done by a local authority rather than by individual schools. If you are an individual school that is keen on getting the STHC but you are not in an LEA that has commissioned it, then your first port of call should be whoever is responsible for sustainable / active travel issues in your local authority. Point them in the direction of this website and see if you can't persuade them to take things further. They would probably tell you that it would make things easier for them if there were several schools interested so why not try to russle up interest from the other schools in your cluster at the same time? If you are having difficulty with any of these then by all means contact us and we'll see if we can help.

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Authorities may commission the STHC service in isolation or in conjunction with their neighbours (each authority is still invoiced on an individual basis). In the latter case additional benefit is achieved for authorities as they can “see” the cross-border movement of pupils between all the authorities that are part of the analysis dataset.

Commissioning the STHC Service is via a simple authority purchase order. We are happy to provide written quotations in advance if clients provide us with the necessary information on the number of schools and pupils in their census data. We are also able to offer flexible, advance invoicing for one or more years worth of output to fit in with clients’ budgetary availability.

We are also happy to liaise directly with the input data providers if there are any concerns of a technical or data protection nature.

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If budgets are tight (as if ;-), we would encourage clients to seek out potential funding partners from other groups with similar or complementary objectives. These could from other service areas within the local authority or from other local agencies. For example many authorities are writing the STHC process and packs in to their Local Transport Plan (LTP3) funding cycle to secure it going forward. There may also be opportunities within projects that have managed to obtain Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF) funding.

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“I can say from experience that trying to do this work in-house, although theoretically possible, is in reality difficult, time consuming and costly. By using the STHC and packs for the schools we have saved months of work and achieved a better output.”
Albert Ward
School Travel Plan Team leader, Somerset County Council

In this section we discuss the cost of the School Travel Health Check service to client authorities:-

• Overall Average Cost
• Standard Service
• School Packs
• Subsequent Orders
• Examples
• Savings For Joint Commissioning

At an average cost of just £0.15 - £0.22 per pupil per year for standard output and school packs (depending on school set up), the STHC Service represents outstanding value for money on a very modest investment for client authorities in their efforts to achieve travel modeshift on the school run.

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The price of the STHC Standard Service for a single census years data processing is set by our transparent pricing formula, so client authorities will always know in advance how much our service is going to cost:-

• £1,500 per Local Authority
• £12 per school
• £0.01 per pupil

All prices quoted exclude VAT.

This will get you:-

• a bespoke STHC Data Portal for your authority, hosted for a year by us, with the following analysis modules:-
  • Distance & Mode Analysis Module (includes "Print Friendly" STHC School Report & Covering Letter webpage).
  • Accident (STATS 19) Analysis Module (currently comes Free with the Distance & Mode Analysis Module).
  
  
• Supporting STHC digital file output:-
  • Google Earth map files (.kml).
  • Geographic Information System (GIS) files (MapInfo format by default, ESRI format available on request.)
  
  

• Membership of the "STHC Club" - our aim is continual improvevement of our service by encouraging feedback from client authorities and incorporating their suggestions into subsequent output wherever possible, either by upgrading the standard service or creating new analysis modules. Thus whilst they remain part of the "STHC Club", all authorities will be assured of automatically benefiting from any future improvements to the standard service at no additional cost. They will also receive a discount on any new analysis modules.

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As previously stated, client authorities can produce their own, school-specific resources from the standard STHC analysis output suite if they have the necessary technical skills and capacity to do so. The “in-house” option however should not be undertaken lightly. The resource commitment in terms of tying up staff and large format printers for the amount of time required to produce packs for all the authority schools, can generate internal conflict! Alternatively clients can let us take care of it for them.

The price of our School Pack Service is determined by the prefered delivery option:-

• £26 per STHC School - We print, fold and collate each pack component into an unsealed envelope for each LEA school. These are then boxed in numerical order by DfE Establishment Number and delivered to clients by overnight courier. Clients can then check the contents, perhaps even augmenting them with their own additional content, before sealing the envelopes and sending them out to schools via their own internal postal system.


• £28 per STHC School - We print, fold and collate each pack component into an envelope, seal it and post packs directly to schools by Royal Mail.

All prices quoted exclude VAT.

In addition to the physical packs sent to schools, there will also be supporting STHC digital file output of:-

• Pupil Travel Map Image Files (.jpg).
• STHC School Report & Covering Letter as individual Adobe Acrobat filesfor each school.

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We absolutely encourage client authorities to repeat the STHC analysis in subsequent years. Alas it will still basically take us a similar amount of time to run the analysis process to generate the STHC output as:-

• its census data, so by definition it changes each year. We hope due to successful travel modeshift measures paying dividends but there are always new children coming into the education system each year and pupils moving up to new school phases.


• there will likely be changes to the school estate - closures, mergers, new schools, existing schools becoming academies, schools changing the range of NCYs they accomodate etc. - so we need to start with a fresh, current school gazetteer file each year.


• we run rigoourous technical quality checks on the input data before processing it and any issues that arise will need to be sorted out with the client authority. This takes time to do!

Thus the cost of subsequent years processing is calculated by the same pricing formula as before. However as mentioned already clients will benefit from continued membership of the "STHC Club", ie. automatic upgrades due to future improvements to the standard output at no additional cost. They will also receive a discount on any new analysis modules.

Thus the available choices for clients in subsequent years are as follows:-

• Repeat processing - cost of susequent years processing is calculated by the same pricing formula as before. Client authorities bespoke STHC Data Portal is updated with the new data.


• Not to repeat processing:-
  • they can pay a 10% annual charge based on the Standard STHC Output Charge as calculated by our pricing formula for continued hosting of their portal and to remain part of the "STHC Club" (ie. to receive automatic upgrades of the portal).
  • if they choose not to pay the annual hosting charge they will no longer part of the STHC club and the portal files as is will be removed from our server. They will be given all the files necessary for them to host their portal as it stands on another server of their choosing, but they will not receive any further upgrades to their portal.

If authorities re-order full analysis at any point in the future, their portal will of course be updated and restored to our server.

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If a group of authorities wishes to collectively commission the STHC then there may be room for negotiation on the total price, however this will depend on there being tangible saving in time on our part due to the economies of scale. For example we would need all the client input data before we could begin processing and analysis, but we would rather not have to spend out time having to chase up the data from each authority in order for us to progress as quickly as we would like to :-(

We are happy to explore all options to make the STHC process as timely and efficient as possible for all concerned. This could for example include supply of School Census Data from a single, national source, or incorporating Pupil Usual Mode of Travel data from alternative sources (eg. class "hands up surveys").

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In this section we discuss how the School Travel Health Check service is delivered to client authorities:-

• Data Portalt
• Supporting Digital File Output
• School Pack Output
• Final Data Pack
• The Caveats

The STHC Output is initially supplied to client officers as a beta release Data Portal as soon as is practicably possible, but certainly within 2-3 working weeks after we begin processing the Clinet Input Data (subject to the caveats below).

However before this can be "rolled out" to schools and colleagues, it needs to be checked by the client authority using their local knowledge. This is just to make sure there aren't any glaring errors or ommissions that are not obvious to us. As already stated we do have a rigourous series of quality control checks that we run on both the client input data and the subsequent analysis output. However these cannot pick up the fact that we have been supplied with incorrect grid reference information for the school and it is in the "wrong place". We do not have time to manually check the location of each school and quite frankly if you guys don't know where your schools are, how the heck are we? ;-)

Once it has been agreed that the data portal is as accurate as can be determined at this stage, it can be put on general release. It is normally the responsibility of the client to promote the STHC Data Portal to their schools through their usual channels of communication.

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Supporting Digital Files will normally be supplied to the client as part of the Final Data Pack on a USB stick after the beta data portal has been approved for general release. However some / all of the Supporting Digital Files can be supplied to clients before this if there is an urgent need. The 2 methods of interim supply are:-

• email attachment if the files aren't too large (the limitation will be depend on the clients email system but is liable to be of the order of 5 - 10 MB).


• or via our secure, online file transfer service provided by www.hightail.com. (the biggest single file we can transfer is 2 GB, however it is more about the bandwidth and the time it takes to download the files at the clients end).

Of course if the required files are too large to be supplied remotely in a practicable way by either of the above, the ultimate recourse is to supply them on a USB stick. There will however be an additional charge for this if it is not the Final Data Pack.

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The delivery timeline for School Packs will be agreed separately with clients as ultimately it is up to them to decide when the best time is for their schools to receive them. Some common times are:-

• “UK Walk To School Week" in the second week of May.
• "International Walk To School Month" in October.
• as part of some other local initiative that will help raise the profile of active / suatainable travel within their local authority. This is where joint working may pay off as you can "ride the coat-tails" of some other initiative (or vice versa as far as your new partners are concerned).

Some clients even choose to deliver their STHC Packs personally to each school in the authority, where it can be used as a catalyst for initial discussions and hopefully, in the longer term, change on the ground. It is entirely up to clients what they do, but please feel free to contact us if you want any advice.

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The Final Data Pack is the ultimate roundup of all the STHC Anlysis output in the one handy data stick. It will normally be delivered after everything else has, including STHC School Packs as the Pupil Travel Map image files and pDF versions of the STHc School report & Covering letter are included as part of the output.

If there needs to be a re-supply of the Final Data Pack due to technical errors with the client input Data, there will be a surcharge levied.

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The School Travel Health Check Service is currently bringing proven benefits to nearly 30 UK local authorities,By March 2012 they had processed over 3.3 million pupil records from over 4,700 UK schools (some 22% of the LEA controlled schools in England).

The map opposite shows the current take up of the STHC as well as expressions of interest as far as we are aware at the time of writing (the map includes those authorities who signed up to our Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF) bid).

Please contact us to find out what is happening with the STHC in your area or register your interest.

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“The connection between physical activity and good health is very clear. Children in particular need to get back to the levels of walking and cycling that prevailed in their parents’ time if we are to reduce the risk of obesity. The School Travel Health Check is, in my opinion, an invaluable tool for all those interested in improving the health and wellbeing of children. It provides such crucial information that I don't see how we can do without it.
If we want to get rates of cycling and walking up to the levels of the best European communities we need to use this data to make sure our transport plans will make that happen. If we fail to take maximum advantage of this opportunity, we may fail our children.”
Dr Gabriel Scally
Regional Director of Public Health for the South West
The Regional Public Health Observatory network exists to improve the health of the population in their region through the collection, monitoring and analysis of data, to produce evidence that will inform decision-making on health issues at local, regional and national levels. In the SW, where the STHC has been going longest, the Regional School “Healthy Schools” initiative. The data is published as part of their “Instant Atlas™ Mapping Tool to support Healthy Scools Plus” page on their website.

“I can say from experience that trying to do this work in-house, although theoretically possible, is in reality difficult, time consuming and costly. By using the STHC and packs for the schools we have saved months of work and achieved a better output.”
Albert Ward
School Travel Plan Team leader, Somerset County Council
Somerset was the authority in which the STHC was first developed way back in 2003-04, when mode of travel data was collected from each individual school! Albert has been involved since the beginning.

“Just to acknowledge receipt [of the final STHC data pack] - Our sustainable school travel forum is most impressed with you work - Brilliant!”
Phil Cornsih
School Travel Awareness Officer, Torbay Council
Torbay have commissioned the STHC since 2007-08, and have been distributing our STHC Packs to schools since 2008-09.

“The School Travel Health Check process provides the essential foundations for development and delivery of Sustainable Modes Of Travel Strategies [SMOTS]. The STHC also frees officer time to do the important work of delivering change”
Emma Sheridan
Former London Regional School Travel Adviser for DfE & DfT and School Travel Manager, Transport for London and Modeshift Chair
Transport for London commissioned the STHC on behalf of 8 London Borough Councils on a pilot basis. Modeshift is the central forum supporting those who are working to achieve shift towards more sustainable and active travel for young people and school communities in the UK.

“The savings in cost and time that the STHC and the packs for schools bring is considerable. It has freed my time to use the STHC output to work toward the strategic change that the STHC identifies.”
Ian Selby
School Travel Plans and SMOTS, Bournemouth Borough Council
Bournemouth first commissioned the STHC analysis for their 2007-08 school census data and so are part of the core of SW authorities that has contributed to its rapid development over the last year. They also commissioned STHC Paper Packs for the first time for 2008-09.

“This work is a rarity, a product from a small consultancy that is motivated by a desire to achieve change and not just to make money. The output is excellent and does help to achieve change. Better still it comes at a very modest price that we cannot match in-house”
Kevin Speakman
School Travel Plans and SMOTS, North Somersetl
North Somerset also first commissioned the STHC analysis for their 2007-08 school census data but have also taken the STHC Paper Packs for all their schools from the start.

“Thanks for getting the data to us for our use to establish a priority list for our safer routes to school and for targeting schools for further action....”

“We've been really impressed with the STHC here in Sandwell. We have most of our schools with travel plans already, so this information will be invaluable for us to take the Travelling to School Initiative to the next level by actually achieving mode shift! Hopefully being able to easily target schools with the biggest potential for mode shift we should be able to get some real results.”
Fleur Tooby
School Travel Adviser, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council
Sandwell were the first authority in the West Midlands region to commission the STHC in 2008-09, where it is being used very effectively at a day-to-day operational level.

“The School Travel Health Check has provided an effective and powerful means of engaging with both schools and officers within the council. The dual aspect of health and environmental impact of the school journey has enabled the team to ensure that links are made to work in school, policy decisions and cross department priorities. The STHC is proving an ideal way to re-engage with schools to help monitor and review their travel plans, without asking them to undertake additional workloads. By showing schools that the STHC is complimentary to existing work within schools we hope to continue to address unnecessary car use and raise awareness of the benefits of sustainable travel.”
Sharon Payne
East of England Regional School Travel Adviser, DfE & DfT and Sustainable School Travel Strategy Officer, Suffolk County Council
Suffolk County Council first commissioned the STHC analysis data for their 2008-09 school census data. They also commissioned us to produce our STHC Paper Packs on a pilot basis for a selected number of schools. As these were successfully received the plan is to roll them out to all (344) Suffolk LEA-controlled schools next year, as well use them as the foundation for formal lessons plans being drawn up for various Key Stages in different areas of the curriculum.

“It was extremely informative to go through the range of [STHC] analysis for the schools in South East Dorset. It provided a lot of 'food for thought' for us in the development of the transport strategies for the South East Dorset area to 2026.”

“We have had to prepare the transport model from scratch and have therefore been involved in an extensive and expensive data collection programme in order to assemble a comprehensive picture of travel patterns and behaviour across South East Dorset. We were therefore delighted to learn about the journey to school data which provided a fully observed picture of travel to school by the variety of modes. The journey to school data was particularly useful in filling in gaps in the travel demand matrices for journeys by private car and public transport. The level of detail and the comprehensive nature of the data meant that it was an ideal basis to supplement the other sources of data.”

“The Journey to school data was vital for us to be able to fill in the gaps between the different roadside interview sites. In other studies we have had to make simplifying assumptions about travel between the interview sites; to be able to use the Journey to School database was a real bonus for us.”
Robert Thompson
Business Manager Policy and Plans, Atkins Transport Planning
STHC data was supplied to Atkins, who were commissioned by Dorset County Council to undertake the South East Dorset Multi Modal Study (underpins LTP3 and MAA).

“The STHC processing has provided an excellent means of opening doors within my authority, particularly in to the growing carbon and health agendas”
Stacey Olver
School Travel Adviser, Plymouth City Council
Plymouth have commissioned the STHC every year since 2007-08.

“I have just received our map / aerial photo and information. I just wanted to say that this is a brilliant piece of work by you, and is extremely helpful to me. Many thanks, and keep up the good work!”
Trevor Jameson
Headteacher, St. George's Primary School, Portland

“Great to have some measurable targets / data to use to set future targets and develop the travel plan. Fantastic maps”
Headteacher
Heyeswood First School, Dorset

“Fascinating detailed information, well displayed, very visual. Will use alongside STP at next review.”
Headteacher
St Josephs School, Christchurch
In October 2009 eleven LEA run schools in Dorset received our STHC School Packs for the very first time. Above is some of the feedback received by the Dorset County Council Sustainable Travel Coordinator.

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Soft Measures – Hard Facts: The Value For Money Of Transport Measures Which Change Travel Behaviour. A Review Of The Evidence
Department of Health / Highways Agency / NHS South West / Travelwise / South West Regional Development Agency (January 2011)
The STHC is cited throughout this review document as the essential evidence base to guide and support intervention on active travel to school.

“This innovative sustainable development initiative aims to provide robust data that will allow schools, planners and individuals to develop more sustainable school travel options.”

“Active travel to school is an important source of physical activity for young people. It could be increased further. These statistics provide a useful baseline against which to measure progress, and should be used in conjunction with a qualitative assessment of local authority and school travel policies.

"The value of each additional young person walking to school has been estimated as £768 from health, less congestion and carbon savings." (p33)

Download the full document from our website here (.pdf, 2.6 MB).

Promoting Active Travel to School: Progress and Potential
Modeshift / Department of Health / NHS South West (November 2010)
The STHC is cited throughout this briefing paper produced to answer the main questions health professionals often ask about promoting active travel to school:-

• How far can young people reasonably be expected to walk or cycle to school?
• Is any progress being made to get more young people active by promoting walking or cycling to school?
• What is the potential for encouraging more young people to walk or cycle to school?
• What can be done to get better value for money?

“One successful way of presenting data at the school and young person level is to use the School Travel Health Check (STHC). This takes the School Census Data and processes it to produce school friendly maps, spreadsheets and reports which give a clear indication of the facts from which individuals, schools and policy makers can decide what to do.”

Download the full document from our website here (.pdf, 0.5 MB).

2009 Annual Report
UK Government Chief Medical Officer
The STHC is cited as the example of best practice for public health in the South West Region in the 2009 Annual Report of the UK Government Chief Medical Officer (see "Increasing active travel by schoolchildren" - p73).

"The synergies between improving health and slowing climate change should be championed by the Government and health leaders to drive bold lifestyle changes." [Recommended Action]

“This innovative sustainable development initiative aims to provide robust data that will allow schools, planners and individuals to develop more sustainable school travel options.”

“Active travel to school is an important source of physical activity for young people. It could be increased further. These statistics provide a useful baseline against which to measure progress, and should be used in conjunction with a qualitative assessment of local authority and school travel policies.”

Download the full document from our website here (.pdf, 3.6 MB).

Towards A School Carbon Management Plan
Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) and the Department For Children, Schools & Families (DCSF) (June 2009)
In June 2009 the SDC and the DCSF jointly published this consultation document. In Section D covering Reducing emissions from school travel and transport, Dorset County Councils use of the STHC is the only example cited of the best use of existing data to inform individual schools of their performance and to identify actions.

“School Travel Plans are only as good as the data on which they are developed. Establishing better quality data sources to underpin School Travel Plans could help schools and School Travel Advisors to target their activities more effectively.

It could also provide a basis for more consistent monitoring (for example, establishing a consistent method of measuring the impact of schemes, benchmarking of activities and comparison of schools and local authorities).

Improved school travel data can also link into local authority work on National Indicator 186 (Per Capita Carbon Emissions in the local authority area). In particular, it can help local authorities to better understand the impact of school travel and the opportunities for interventions.

Existing data sources can be better used (as evidenced by the Dorset County Council [STHC] case study). It is important that Regional and Local School Travel Advisers understand the data that is available to them and how it can be used and interpreted. Existing data can also be used to inform individual schools of their performance and to identify actions.”

Download the full document from our website here (.pdf, 0.4 MB).

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As your supplier:-

• the data you supply to us is at all times your property and they are free to inspect our offices to ensure that it is being processed in accordance with due diligence.


• we will only use any data you supply for the stated purposes.


• we will only allow authorised personnel to have access to it.


• we will not share it with 3rd parties.

We are happy to sign any additional data sharing protocols that your authority requires.

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A number of technical measures to further de-personalise what is in fact already very de-personalised data are built in to the STHC analysis process:-

• use of pupil postcode centroids, not their home address.


• dispersal of the geocoded pupils around the postcode centroid point.


• use of our own unique pupil identifier for each pupil record in the analysis process.
  Note: The Unique Pupil Reference Numbers (UPRNs) that are part of the original input data will only appear in the STHC output data supplied directly to the client to enable them to cross-reference it with other pupil data they hold. They will never appear in the data portal output.

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The whole purpose of the STHC service is to produce analysis data that can be shared by all the stakeholders interested in how children travel to school and how far they travel to get there. It therefore defeats our purpose if data protection concerns prevent this from happening. At the same time we have to take due cognisance of the genuine concerns there are around data protection. Within our Data Portal a number of measures exist to address these:-

• Portal Log-In Requirements
• Restricted Map Zoom

The whole purpose of the STHC service is to produce analysis data that can be shared by all the stakeholders interested in how children travel to school and how far they travel to get there. It therefore defeats our purpose if data protection concerns prevent us doing this.

The simple truth of the matter is the less detailed the input data, the less useful the analysis results can be. If we are trying to effect behaviour change in the individual pupil, we need to analyse individual pupil-level input data over time if we want to monitor how the situation is changing over time. Otherwise how are we supposed to have any idea if the measures we are undertaking on the greound are having any effect?

No doubt we will expand this section in future but for now, if you have any concerns about Data Protection then please contact us and we will be happy to discuss them with you.

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Our STHC Guidance documents provide an overview of the service, what input data is required (and why), describe the analysis output and suggest uses for the data in the local authority environment. The STHC is continuously being reviewed and updated in response to the ever changing data and policy environment as well as advances in data visualisation technology. Thus these guides will be updated on a regular basis and, as with all other aspects of the STHC, we welcome any feedback and ideas from users on how to improve them.

STHC Guide 1 - Overview (v3.6, July 2013)

This guide gives an overview of the STHC – the input data required from client authorities, the basic analysis process, what exactly they get back as standard output and what they may want to commission as an additional service, the benefits it will bring them, who else is doing it already, how much it will cost them and the delivery timescales for them receiving their analysis data. Finally there is some discussion about data protection issues. This guide should be freely distributed to colleagues, managers and potential partners as part of the internal awareness raising process.

Click here to download the STHC Guide 1 - Overview document (.pdf, 1.4 MB).

STHC Guide 2 - Client Input Data (v3.3, July 2013)

This guide describes in more detail the datasets client authorities need to supply to us (the “Client Input Data”) in order for us to undertake the School Travel Health Check. It has been produced to tell client officers what datasets we require, how they fit into our analysis process and whom they need to contact within their authority to get hold of them. However it has also been designed to be read by Data Holders to inform them why this data is being requested from them by the officer and what they need to supply at a technical level (they need only read the sections about the datasets they are concerned with!).

Click here to download the STHC Guide 2 - Client Input Data document (.pdf, 1.4 MB).

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After a 2 tranche bidding process that ended in September 2012, the Department for Transports Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF) is now in the course of providing £600 million to successful local authorities in England to fund sustainable travel projects.

We would very much encourage local authorities to use some of their hard-won LSTF funding to commission the STHC (if they haven't done so already) to ensure they have a secure, spatial-analysis evidence base to monitor the impact of their projects going forward. It will be easier to source future funding to maintain projects if they have a proven and quantifiable record of success. (Working out at less than £0.16 per pupil for standard processing plus STHC School packs for every school in the authority, we think our costs are very reasonable and our transparent pricing formula means that clients can work out in advance how much a years STHC will cost them. Our flexible invoicing makes it easier for our clients to juggle their budgets too!)

• Background to the LSTF
• STHC / Dorset County Council LSTF Bid

The Local Transport White Paper "Creating growth, cutting carbon: making sustainable local transport happen", published in January 2011, placed localism at the heart of the transport agenda in order to cut carbon emissions and create local economic growth. The Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF) established by the Department for Transport made available a total of £560 million to fund local authority sustainable travel projects in a 2 tranche bidding process. Funding was topped up with a further £40 million to £600 million in 2012 to accommodate approval for a greater number of bids, with match funding being provided by local authority partners. In total DfT awarded funding to 96 packages from 77 authorities to deliver their schemes between 2011 and 2015. Along with local contributions provided by all funded project teams, over £1 billion is now being invested in local sustainable travel.

The funding announcements made were as follows:

• 11 September 2012, Ministers approved just under £5 million to Tyne and Wear ITA for a small project, based on the strongest elements of their Large Project proposal (which was turned down for funding in June 2012)
• 27 June 2012, Ministers awarded £225 million to 12 large projects (above £5 million), plus £41 million to 14 tranche 2 projects (small projects up to £5 million)
• 24 May 2012, Ministers awarded £113 million to 30 tranche 2 projects (small projects up to £5 million)
• 5 July 2011, Ministers awarded £155 million to 39 tranche 1 projects (small projects up to £5 million)

Click here to see the list of all LSTF projects, including the bids that were unsuccessful.

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Thanks to the 27 authorities that signed up to our LSTF bid with Dorset County Council. Had we been successful, funding to provide the full STHC analysis service with additional STHC School Packs to every school in the bid authorities on an annual basis until 2015 would have been secured.

Undaunted the STHC carries on under the existing funding model and we encourage local authorities to build the STHC into their projects from the start (if they haven't done so already). Please contact us for further information on the use of the STHC in LSTF funded projects.

STHC / Dorset County Council LSTF bid partner authorities:-

• Bournemouth Borough Council
• Brighton and Hove City Council
• Buckinghamshire County Council
• Cornwall Council
• Essex County Council
• Gloucestershire County Council
• Hampshire County Council
• Hertfordshire County Council
• Kent County Council
• Leicester City Council
• Lincolnshire County Council
• North Lincolnshire Council
• Luton Borough Council
• Northumberland County Council
• Plymouth City Council
• Poole Borough Council
• Reading Borough Council
• Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council
• Suffolk County Council
• Swindon Borough Council
• Telford & Wrekin Council
• Thurrock Council
• Torbay Council
• West Berkshire Council
• Wiltshire County Council
• Worcestershire County Council

Click here to download the STHC / Dorset County Council LSTF Bid document(.pdf, 1.4 MB).

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On the 29th July 2011 the Department for Education announced that in order to “reduce bureaucracy”, Pupil Usual Mode of Travel had been immediately dropped as a data field from the National School Census. This section tells the story of this as best we can determine. Note that despite all of these "shenanigans at the centre", we continue to offer the School Travel Health Check Service to all interested local authorities. Even in the absence of pupil usual mode of travel there is much useful distance information that can be derived from spatial analysis of basic pupil postcode data, which will always be a critical component of national school census.

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On the 29th July 2011 the Department for Education announced in the pages of issue no. 50 of the Information about children, education and schools (ICES) e-bulletin that they had unilaterally decided to remove the Pupil Usual Mode of Travel data field from the English National School Census with immediate effect. This was much to the surprise of ourselves and other providers of data analysis services, not to mention all other government departments, local authorities and schools who were reliant on the data for many of their own strategic planning and operational purposes. In this section of the website we do our best to get to the bottom of this uncharacteristically swift action by the DfE, and the reaction of the school travel community to it.

Update: On the 2nd of February 2012 The Department for Transport invited interested parties from local and central government (but sadly not the providers of data analysis services used by government!) to a round-table discussion on the possible way forward for the continued collection of mode of travel data from schools on a national basis. The general consensus of the meeting was that it was impossible for this data to be collected on a national basis outside of school census within the resources and timeframe available, and that the simplest solution all round was that the Department for Education should re-instate the mode of travel into the school census but make it a voluntary field (ie. if it's filled in it's collected during the automatic data upload process, if it's not it's left blank but its absence doesn't cause any data integrity problems further down the line). Despite this being not at all technically difficult to do, and that schools will continue to collect the data from their pupils anyway becasue their information management system still allows them to and it's collection often is part of classroom lessons, the DfE steadfastly refuse to do this and are unlikely to change their mind. Thus despite the contention from DfE that removal of mode of travel from school censsus will reduce bureaucracy in schools, it will lead to a dramatic increase in bureaucracy for those schools and local authorities that still wish to collect the data because they realise the value of knowing how their pupils travel to school and how far they travel to get there.

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You can piece together the whole sorry tale and come to your own conclusions by downloading the documents below. The STHC Briefing Paper to the wider School Travel Community is a good place to start. In this section you can view / download the following documents:-

• STHC Briefing Paper
• ICES Bulletin #49 (June 2011)
• ICES Bulletin #50 (July 2011)
• ModeShift Briefing Paper
• ModeShift Press Release
• ModeShift Letter To Schools Minister
• Dorset Letter To Schools Minister
• STHC Letter To Schools Minister (and his reply)
• STHC Letter to Enterprise Minister (alas no reply)

STHC Briefing Paper On The Sudden Announcement By DfE That The Pupil’s Usual Mode Of Travel Field Is No Longer To Be Collected As Part Of The School Census (2nd August 2011)

This paper contains the “facts” of the matter around the announcement as far as could be gleaned from the DfE website at the time, and was the basis for the ModeShift briefing paper sent round the school travel community. The hope was that it contained enough background information, direct quotes and points of contact to enable all the stakeholders who currently benefit from the collection of mode of travel data through National School Census to successfully engage with officials within DfE, and the relevant Minister For Schools (one Nick Gibb, MP for Bognor Regis in West Sussex), to get this decision reversed.

According to DfE officials these changes were all happening at the insistence of the minister, which presumably is why they had been implemented unilaterally, without any exteranl consultation with the local authority active and sustainable travel community, and against long established departmental procedures controlling changes to the contents of the School Census (ie. the so called "Star Chamber Scrutiny Board").

Click here to download the STHC Briefing Paper document (.pdf, 0.1 MB).

Information about children, education and schools (ICES) e-bulletin #49 (June 2011)

The June edition of the official DfE technical bulletin which, in its article reviewing proposed changes to the School Census, does not even mention that removal of the "Pupil Usual Mode of Travel field" was even being considered, or that there was a "comprehensive root and branch review" of the school census taking place.

Click here to download the (ICES) e-bulletin #49 document (.pdf, 0.1 MB).

Information about children, education and schools (ICES) e-bulletin #50 (July 2011)

The July edition of the official DfE technical bulletin which announced that, not only had the "Pupil Usual Mode of Travel field" now been removed from the School Census but also that the alterations to the technical specs for the school information management systems had already been implemented by the software vendors.

Click here to download the (ICES) e-bulletin #50 document (.pdf, 0.1 MB).

ModeShift Briefing Paper For Local Authorities On The Removal Of Pupil Mode Of Travel From National School Census (August 2011)

Modeshift is the national membership organisation that specialises in active and sustainable travel and provides behaviour change support for those working with children, young people, families, school communities and educational establishments. This briefing paper was produced by them and circulated round the local authority active and sustainable travel community to raise awareness of the DfE removal of Usual Pupil Mode of Travel from School Census. As mentioned already this action was taken suddenly and unilaterally by DfE without any external consulation (certainly not via their official bulletin anyway) so many local authorities were unaware of it.

Click here to download the ModeShift Briefing Paper document (.pdf, 0.2 MB).

ModeShift Press Release On The Removal Of Pupil Mode Of Travel From National School Census (25th August 2011)

Once again Modeshift endeavour to get the word out.

Click here to download the ModeShift Press Release document (.pdf, 0.3 MB).

ModeShift Letter To Schools Minister Nick Gibb MP (26th August 2011)

ModeShift put the national case for re-instatement of Mode of Travel to Schools Census to the Schools Minister.

Click here to download the ModeShift Letter To Schools Minister document (.pdf, 0.1 MB).

Dorset County Council Letter To Schools Minister Nick Gibb MP (25th August 2011)

Dorset County Council, (one of our STHC authorities) put the local case for re-instatement of Mode of Travel to Schools Census to the Schools Minister.

Click here to download the Dorset County Council Letter To Schools Minister document (.pdf, 0.1 MB).

STHC Letter To Schools Minister Nick Gibb MP (13th September 2011)

Our frankly "bloody livid" letter putting the case for re-instatement of Mode of Travel to Schools Census to the Schools Minister from the data services industry perspective. Our main points were:-

• Lack of transparency or open-ness - There seems little point in having well advertised, apparently stringently applied, school census data collection policies & procedures, developed by data management professionals over several years, if they are going to be ignored just because the new minister thinks “wouldn’t it be a good idea if ….. “. The Star Chamber Secretariat have been unable to provide the written business case that, according to the official DfE data collection policy guidelines, must always be submitted before a decision on any change to the school census can be made. This lack of open-ness flies in the face of the Prime Ministers assertions that his is one of the most “open, accountable and transparent governments there is” when it comes to data - well according to his recent speech on the Data.gov website anyway!


• Lack of consultation with data stakeholders, especially end users - We have developed the STHC service over the last 5 years in partnership with local authority end users and with the full knowledge of the DfE Travel To School Initiative Board. By 2011 we had processed over 3 million pupil mode of travel records from over 4,800 UK schools - some 22% of the LEA controlled schools in England. I think we can therefore safely claim to be a major stakeholder and end user of school census data. However the first we, or any of our 29 local authority clients, knew about any change to mode of travel data collection was a “fait accompli” announcement that it was going to be dropped from the national school census , and the SIMS software supplier specifications had already been changed.


• Lack of consultation with, and regard for, the Data Services industry - SME’s such as ourselves are the backbone of the UK “knowledge economy”, one of the things that is apparently going to pull this country out of recession. Using our specialist skills and resources that are usually not available “in-house” to many organisations, we build targeted information products and services on the back of the bewildering deluge of available data. However no matter how innovative and well received those products are, there is little long term future for SMEs like us investing all our time and financial resources developing them in collaboration with one part of government, if another part of government is going to pull the rug out from underneath us, without any prior warning and apparently acting on a ministerial whim.
  We have existing local authority clients who have already commissioned the STHC from us right up to 2012-13, how are we to provide them with the service they have paid for if there isn’t any data to analyse? How is this decision going to save them money?
  We are also currently in talks with the Department of Health to develop the STHC to meet the needs of the Directors of Public Health now coming into local authorities. How are we going to grow our business to support the publicly stated government agenda if there is an axe hanging over the core analysis dataset


• Lack of publicity - For what is effectively a major u-turn in government data collection policy, it smacks of trying to sneak things through “on the quiet” to announce it only via a monthly, technical e-bulletin, and then as a “fait accompli”. Note that the previous month’s (June) edition gave no indication that the removal of the Mode of Travel field was even being considered in an article outlining, bullet point by bullet point, the proposed changes to the 2011-12 school census


• Unseemly haste - Piecing together the trail of various DfE communications over the last few weeks would indicate that the entire process - from first “why don’t we …?” thought out of nowhere by somebody within DfE, to the “limited” internal consultation, to the final decision, to the uncharacteristic, last minute re-issuing of official technical guidance to SIMS software suppliers - happened in less than 4 weeks. Now that’s fast for any organisation let alone the leviathan that is the Department for Education! Anyone might think that the Minister for Schools or one of his close advisors almost had a personal vendetta against mode of travel data!


• Going against the tide of national “public good” data initiatives - There are many “public good” national data initiatives going on right now that we and the rest of the spatial data community are doing our best to help facilitate – Open Data, Data.gov, the European INSPIRE directive on environmental data, the UK Location Program to name but a few. Your department is even actively participating in some of these – I note that school level census data is available to be downloaded from the Data.gov website.
  You will know then that at their heart, these initiatives are all about “joining up” data (government collected or otherwise) and using it in new and innovative ways to help tackle the complex issues of the world. “Collect once, use many times for as many different purposes as possible” is just plain, common sense. It is widely recognised that not only will this enable better, evidence-based formulation and execution of government policy, but it will actually make government as a whole more efficient and save us all money in the longer term. Thus this decision to no longer collect at a national level a core dataset that is key to tackling issues of national interest like child obesity and climate change, is ill-founded and a serious step backwards for the UK.

Click here to download the STHC Letter To Schools Minister document (.pdf, 0.3 MB).

Letter Of Reply From The Education Minister (23rd September 2011)

This is the reply from the Start Chamber Secretariat on behalf of the minister. Apart from changing a couple of words it is the same reply that went out to the local authorities that wrote to him and does not address any of our points above on the lack of transparency or following existing departmental procedures with regard to changes to school census.

Click here to download the Letter Of Reply From The Education Minister document (.pdf, 0.5 MB).

STHC Letter to Enterprise Minister Mark Prisk MP (14th September 2011)

Alas we received no response from the Minister at the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills on our specific points about the anti-business way in which the DfE have gone about this process.

Click here to download the STHC Letter to Enterprise Minister document (.pdf, 0.3 MB).

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