Peer to Peer Walk to School campaign

The idea

A Peer to Peer Walk to Secondary School campaign website.

My job is to encourage secondary school pupils to walk all or part of their journey to school.

Instead of providing standard information to everyone across the country about this issue, I want to create a website where teenagers can create their own peer to peer campaign within their school. The site will provide them with campaigning resources (background, surveys, videos, petitions, etc) as well as access to expert advice.

They can use the site to create, print and share their own campaign materials (T-shirts, banners, leaflets, etc) so their campaign is localised – not simply “Walk to School” but “Walk to St Mary’s School, Wimbledon!”

What social need does it address?

According to the National Travel Survey, only 40% of 11-16 year olds walk to school, and only 3% go by bike.

Research shows that walking an extra hour each week reduces average weight gain by two stone over a decade. According to the Institute of European Environmental Policy, if everyone walked an extra hour, we could reduce CO2 emissions from passenger cars by 15.4%.

Nationally, Government has asked every school to produce a school travel plan (a document setting out how they will promote sustainable travel to school) by 2010, but there are few resources available for schools to use to try to change travel behaviour.

The Walk to School Campaign has an existing campaign for primary schools, and have just received some funding for secondary schools from BIG. We believe that targeting children’s journey to school will help them to make sustainable travel choices as they grow up, as well as providing them with tools for independence.

What’s new about it?

The really new part of the idea is providing a tool to create a localised bespoke campaign where the audience are also the campaigners.

The merchandise would be desirable and effective for the audience as they would be localised and relevant to them. The merchandise would be printed on demand and sold through the site to help fund the campaign (using www.printshop.co.uk or similar).

Longer term, I plan to work with commercial companies to offer contests through the site to keep the users returning – for instance a video competition where the winners have their entry shown in a cinema etc.

It would also utilise social networking within the school environment in a positive way, and would give the users an understanding of the issues to a depth that they would not ordinarily get.

What inspired you?

My idea was inspired by my work on the primary Walk to School campaign, hearing about a school in Scotland which created their own sustainable travel campaign for their classmates, and Greenpeace’s www.greenmyapple.com (amongst other things!)

Idea submitted by Andrew Fielding

Andrew coordinates the Walk to School Campaign for Secondary schools.