Dear Head Teacher

Welcome to your new School Travel Health Check School Pack. The STHC (www.sthc.co.uk), which has been commissioned annually in since 2007-08, undertakes spatial analysis of the School Census and Pupil Usual Mode Of Travel data provided by your school to Dorset County Council in the spring term (spring 2017 is the latest available). The results are published as easily digestible information resources in the form of the Report, Pupil Travel Maps and Key Results Table in this STHC Pack sent to all schools, and a publicly accessible, interactive, online STHC Data Portal at www.sthc.co.uk/portals/dorset (see the enclosed Portal Quick Start guide).

The STHC resources visualise and quantify at whole-authority and individual school level:-

• How far pupils currently travel to school, from where, and by what means.
• How each school compares to any other school in the authority, and to the authority average as a whole.
• How this has changed over time.
• The impact this has on pupils and the environment.

Whilst there is no single solution to reduce the number of "child miles" travelled by Car / Van on the school run, individual schools like yours can play their part at a local level. The spatial nature of the STHC analysis enables us to see that collectively, progress has been made by schools.

For example as you can see from the chart above, since the STHC began there has been nearly a 30% reduction in the number of pupils that live within a reasonable walking distance of their school coming by Car / Van (technical issues around data collection from all schools not withstanding).

1. Explore Them Within Your School Management Team - They are free to use and contain much useful information that can assist you with both the day-to-day, and strategic, management of the school. Also their interactive, geostatistical nature and local relevance ("Think Global, Act Local"), make them ideal teaching resources for many areas of the curriculum, such as numeracy, geography, health & well-being and citizenship.

2. Encourage Your Whole School Community To Use Them - Make sure they make it into the staffroom, the classroom, your School Travel Plan (STP) working group, your Board of Governors, your PTA and any other stakeholders with an interest in how far, from where, and by what means, pupils travel to your school. Why not put the STHC School Pack resources up on the school & staffroom notice boards for starters?
Note: All online resources are publicly accessible but, given the perceived sensitivity around the use of postcode data, schools must log-in to the portal to see pupil icons on maps, otherwise pupils are shown as anonymised "heatmaps" (log-in account details for your school are provided in the accompanying STHC Data Portal Quick Start Guide, as well as from the local contacts listed below). Similar sensitivities may be associated with the paper Pupil Travel Maps in this pack. Management Teams should have a common sense approach to sharing what is, after all, their data!

3. Initiate / Continue An Informed Debate Around The Issues Of Active And Sustainable Travel In Your School Community - We all need to be more aware of the consequences of the travel choices we currently make, whilst thinking about what we would ideally choose to do. The "Questions For Debate (QfD)" in each of the resources will get the conversation started. Also the STHC analysis process generates short and long term Sustainable Travel indicators that let you quickly see where your school 'is at' right now (see Report):-

• If your score is Red or Amber: Don’t despair! We understand that the location or nature of your school may be a major factor in determining how your pupils travel to it. However this should not prevent your school having an informed debate to raise local awareness around the issues.
• If your score is Green: Before you open the champagne, the authority average is still well above where it needs to be to stop climate change! If we are all to live within the Earth’s carrying capacity we need to move from our current UK annual average of all CO₂ emissions of 10 tonnes per person to 1 tonne.

4. Set SMART Targets For Change - Use the quantitative data in the STHC to set Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound targets for change to aim for as a school community. For example:-

• Short Term: Reduce the number of pupils being driven from within the walking threshold. Why not run a "No Car Within Walk Threshold" challenge?
• Medium Term: Increase the distance pupils are prepared to walk or cycle to school - target those just beyond the current walking thresholds (those pupils outside of the circle on the STHC School Maps).
• Long Term: Consider how big an area your school draws pupils from. Should you be trying to draw more pupils from your local area or looking to provide more sustainable transport options?

Please don’t hesitate to contact the Transport Policy Team if you would like further assistance with the STHC and the issues surrounding travel to your school. We want it to be of as much use to you as possible – all ideas on how to improve it for the future are welcomed!

PS: If some of your figures / maps don’t look right - Your STHC relies on the School Census and Pupil Usual Mode Of Travel data you record in your School Information Management System being accurate, and us having the correct coordinates for your school. Please check the Pupil Travel Maps for rogue postcodes / modes of travel, and have any errors corrected in time for the next School Census / Pupil Usual Mode of Travel data return.
PPS: Split-Site Schools - If your school shares a common DfE number with other sites the STHC output will not reflect the true travel patterns of all your pupils. Please let us know if this applies to you.

This report summarises how far pupils are travelling to your school and by what means. It is based on spatial analysis of the School Census and Pupil Usual Mode of Travel data (if you have collected it), provided by your school to Dorset County Council in Spring 2017. Use it in conjunction with the rest of your STHC resources to debate and encourage active and sustainable travel to your school.

This section contains information about your school to help put the STHC analysis results into context. The Pupil Location Map shows the distribution of pupils as anonomised 'hotspots' along with the walk threshold for your school type. The interactive version on the STHC portal also shows pupils by mode of travel icon.

We know how pupils travel to your school from the Pupil Usual Mode Of Travel data you collect in your schools' information management system. If your school did not submit any data to your local authority in , the STHC Sustainable Travel Red / Amber / Green Indicators we have calculated will not be accurate as Unknown (UNK) modes of travel are treated as Car / Van for CO₂ emissions purposes. The "Top 4" pupil usual modes of travel in your school are highlighted below (headline stats for all modes are shown in your STHC Portal). The bar charts & line graphs show all modes alongside those for as a whole by way of comparison.

The starting point of our spatial analysis is to calculate the straight-line ("as the crow flies") distance between the centre of a pupils home postcode area and the actual school they attend. We call this the "Pupil Home – 'Actual' School Distance", or just "'Actual' Distance" for short. It represents the length of a single pupil journey from either home to school or back again. From these basic measurements we calculate both the total and average distances travelled, for each travel mode if possible. The results for the "Top 4" pupil usual modes of travel in your school are highlighted below, alongside those for as a whole by way of comparison.