We take active travel extremely seriously at Bounds Green School.  We have had an active School Travel Plan in place since 2008, and have been awarded Gold status since 2012 .

Our dedicated School Business Manager co-ordinates an inordinate amount of activities for the school community to participate in.  This continuously keeps the messages in the forefront of all we do. Our busy location means we have to consider the impact of air pollution and car use on our whole school.

We take part in every activity that Haringey Council’s Smarter Travel team provide, from Walk to School Week, cycle training, maintenance, scootering, and transition.  We fully support the messages of anti-pollution and not driving up to the school gates! We also source external ideas and activities.

We were supported to create a natural green screen along the school perimeter on Bounds Green Road side, which has finally grown up over our school fence.  We are now seeing the benefits, with increased foliage and coverage to reduce particulate matter coming in through what was an open fence.

We have worked with the Pollution Team on raising awareness of no idling vehicles, we have some excellent posters that have been made into a banner to support No Idling at our school.

We operate an in depth study to run our BOW SOW WOW promotion (bike, scoot and walk once a week scheme).  Every Wednesday, teachers record how children travelled to school.  Those children who travelled to school by a sustainable mode of travel every week that month receives a different badge each month.

We commit funding within our school budgets to support the purchase of competition prizes, BOW SOW WOW badges, plants and pay for events such as road safety workshops.

Our families are very vocal in their demands on improving air quality and road safety, and will champion any relative cause to improve the school. This was successful in a new zebra crossing on Park Road and making sure our pedestrian bridge was brought up to a better state of repair.

During lockdown, we listened to our families, we developed safer methods of delivery and collection of our pupils by creating bubble areas inside the premises, this kept the roads and paths clearer outside, as there was no family queuing.

Over the years, we have had different groups of Junior Travel Ambassadors (Year 5/6 pupils), who get fully engrossed in their role. They are confident to deliver messages to the rest of the school and represent us at borough events.  We have seen our JTA teams grow in self esteem and know that these messages are important to us and for the wider community.  They are also very aware, through our educational programme that these messages are also relevant to the world.  The JTAs work with our School Business Manager.

The result of our Gold achievements is that the whole school have environmental issues at the fore of their education, they grow in knowledge of sustainable active travel.

We are proud of our very low car use at our school, however this has increased since Covid, but we are confident our efforts will improve this in this current academic year.

BG School Travel Policy