We are the Step Up team from Excelsior Academy. The Academy is divided into four mini schools but only two of the schools – Jefferson and Milburn - signed up for the campaign. We decided it would be better to pair up both schools to create a combined team "THE JEFFBURN WALKERS!!!" because there would be more of us to help encourage children to walk to school. We are all currently in Year 10 or 11We are looking forward to participating in the campaign because we agree that it would be better all round: for the children; the community; and the environment if young people walk to school.

We are excited about the things we could be doing and are eager to inspire young minds to step up their act and walk to school.

We have recently moved into an impressive new building in the west end of Newcastle. Since we have changed our building, we feel it is time to change the habits of the many students that attend our academy by spreading our message throughout the school that 'walking is cool'.

James Rutter

James has written about what happened next.

Mission 2:

On the 17th of March 2009, our team discussed how to get our campaign up and running. After brainstorming some excellent ideas we all concluded that we would target the younger population of our school. We felt the current year 7s would be able to relate better to the new year 7s in September and therefore make a continuous cycle of children walking to school.

However we started thinking about possible ways in which children might not want to walk to school, and decided we should ensure children that these discouragements would be gone so that they would want to walk to school.

We decided that the most important reason pupils wouldn't walk to school is because:

o Gangs of kids (hoodies) – to solve this problem we are going to encourage children to walk in groups or walk a route where there are no gangs.

o Litter- to help, we thought we could go litter picking and make posters that tell people not to litter.

o Too rainy- we thought we might as well cover this one because even though it is summer – you can never depend on the British weather! So we decided to ask children to bring waterproof coats or umbrellas to store in their lockers. If however the children can't afford waterproof or weather proof clothing then they should be allowed to use public transport as this is better than using a car. This is because if there are five different children from different families all using cars, that would be five vehicles, however if they all use public transport that will only be one vehicle.

o Car fumes - we decided that children wouldn't be able to complain about car fumes as much because as more people walk to school, the fewer cars there will be on the road.

o Unfit- even if the child is unfit we considered the possibility of encouraging more students to ride bikes etc to school. Also this is a very good way to keep young children fit and healthy.

This is what the Excelsior team thought of doing their Mission:

"this mission was fairly easy and we also think it went quite well as we managed to get our year 7s to fill in the competition cards".

21st April 2009: Sarah came in to help us

We decided to aim our survey at years 7 & 8 to make them become more aware of the benefits of walking to school because most of them wouldn't. We would be able to encourage them to walk because our survey would find out reasons why they don't walk, and then tackle that particular issue. We could get parents to encourage their children and try to ensure they walk in groups for safety reasons as well as saving money for the parents.

Ways we could encourage people to walk:

C Tell them (talk to them)

C Rewards e.g. raffles, Eldon square vouchers, Non uniform day, trips

C Show through the medium of drama

C Celebrities (footballers) to encourage children

We are going to refine the questionnaire to help us to decide what to do.

On Monday 18th of May 2009, we had a visitor called Jessica, from Sustrans (sustainable transport), the organisation which looks after the Step Up campaign for our funder, the Big Lottery Fund. She was here with Sam Potter from Living Streets, who run the Step Up campaign. She asked us a few questions about what we had done so far in the campaign.

We each told her about various different things we had done - such as the Launch Day which took place in Dance City; the visit from Sarah Allen; giving out the competition cards; the graffiti poster; and the questionnaire we have designed to find out how many students are currently walking to school. We also talked to her about our future plans and how we have decided to do a pedometer challenge with year 7's and 8's as they are the year groups we are focusing on.

The meeting with Jessica was great because we got to use the school conference room and Radafina, one of the members from our group, bought some healthy food for us all - orange juice, cookies, ready salted crisps, chocolate fingers, grapes and bananas.

The room was very pleasant and it made everything seem official as many of us hadn't been in there before. After the meeting we gave Jessica and Sam a tour of the school, telling them about our new school in general as well as introducing them to Ms Futers, the Principal of Jefferson.

(written by Bilkish)

..to be continued....

visit our website at http://www.excelsiornewcastle.org.uk/