At Deer Park School, we are proud to travel sustainably.
We have a clear travel plan for encouraging all pupils and parents to walk, scoot or cycle to school, with secure bike park open every day for all pupils and staff to utilise. This has been working extremely well over the first year and beyond in our new home, with a relentless approach from the school leaders in delivering this travel plan.
As part of our efforts to promote physical activity and help the environment by reducing the impact of emissions, all our staff travel to school by walking, cycling or public transport. How a potential member of staff will travel to work is one of the questions we ask at the interview stage, and we do this in order to instil the culture of reducing private transport to school early on. The trust we are part of, BPET, is part of the cycle to work scheme and actively encourages all staff across nine schools to cycle if possible or appropriate.
But we don’t stop with our staff. We encourage local parents to drop off and pick up children by sustainable means – whenever that is possible – as this has multiple benefits, such as reducing traffic, improving the quality of air around the school, inspiring children to be more physically active, as well as saving on fuel costs. We live on a busy road and keen to do our bit to encourage sustainable travel to school. 90% of pupils travel sustainably to our school.
To achieve this we have created and implemented a number of initiatives. Notably, our Eco Council team encouraged all pupils to participate in the Sustrans Big Walk and Wheel (March-April 2022) and received a certificate to celebrate the incredible achievement attained.
We invited to a school assembly an officer from the Idling Action London project team who delivered a presentation on air pollution followed by a workshop, suggesting ways in which children can reduce their own exposure to traffic, and making posters with them exploring cleaner walking routes to school from their homes.
Officers from the Metropolitan Police also visited the school and lead a workshop discuss road safety with the children.
The above are only a few activities we implemented to encourage sustainable travel. Other initiatives include scooter training, the creation of parking spaces for scooters and bicycles on school premises, campaigning with local residents about the presence of the school and road safety, and taking part and achieving Golden Lock (Bike Week), Peddle My Wheels Bike Market, WOW (walk once a week), Car free day and Car park safety events.
For all the above, we are very proud to have received the Gold Standard Accreditation from Transport for London in Sept 2022, which follows a previous Gold Standard Accreditation already achieved in 2018.