We are year 7 students from Sedgefield Communty College. Our school are involved with a number of sustainability projects and we try to encourage the whole school community to be more environmentally friendly.  The Living Streets Step Up Campaign has helped us to try and change the behaviour of pupils, parents and staff and promote walking to schools – this is our blog.

The project started in April 2011 and we initially thought about our own walks to school and marked things on a map – these became our ‘isues’ that we thought we might focus on and trying to improve.

We then carried out a survey of the streets and roads surrounding our school to decide how we can make our walk to school safer and nicer and therefore encourage more people to walk to school.

There are a lot of alleyways around our school through Sedgefield village.  These are not pleasant due to graffiti and we don’t feel very safe in these and perhaps deter students walking to school. People smoke in them too and older people often gather in them and it can feel quite intimidating.

There are 3 main roads through the village:

Station Road

The Lane

High Street

 

As well as being the main routes for traffic, they are also the main walking routes to school.  They are all 30mph zones, however, only High Street has a zebra crossing.  The Lane has no crossing or traffic calming measures.  Station Road has a traffic island and some traffic calming measures but no crossing.  There is no crossing outside the main entrance to school either.

 

We have decided to focus our campaign on the alleyways and tidying up the streets to make them more attractive and feel safer.  We will contact the local authority and ask why there is only one safe crossing point on the village’s roads.  We have already invited community engagement officers from the local authority to come and work with us on litter picking activities and reminding local people to pick up their dog’s mess!

We are going to consult the rest of the pupils that walk to school and get their ideas to improve the local area.  We will then try to encourage those students that can walk but do not, to walk to school.  We will design t-shirts for the lead pupils involved in this project to wear and purchase a gazebo and have a stall outside the main entrance in order to attract people to give the thoughts and ideas.

We also hope to develop a presentation and to be given a slot of time at a Senior Managers meeting to promote our work.  This will then lead to potential further funding or staff support to increase our impact, not just on the number of people walking to school, but also on our environmental policy and encouraging healthy lifestyles. 

We are all looking forward to doing this between April and the summer holidays.