Walk Ride GM and Mums for Lungs held the first ever School Street and Beyond Conference on 16 May in Manchester focused on supporting schools starting on their journey towards increasing active travel journeys to school.
It was a glorious sunny day and we kicked off the event with a real-life ‘School Street’ outside St Thomas Centre in Ardwick, where we were holding the event. This involved arranging a Temporary Traffic Regulation Order from Manchester City Council to close the street for an hour.
Around 25 children came over from Coop Academy Primary to come and experience what it feels like to have no traffic on the road. They had a great time being ferried up and down the road in cargo bikes and being able to play and draw on the road.
We also asked them to think about what their perfect journey to school would be and they came up with some fabulous ideas. Both teachers and pupils will now go away with lots of ideas for improving the journey to school for the children – hopefully they’ll have a chance to have their own School Street.
Welcoming a mixture of local council officers and representatives from schools across GM in the audience, we launched with a series of talks aimed at providing practical information for schools. Hannah Stanton, Trafford Council’s School Streets officer, gave an overview of the ins and outs of running a School Street. Gosia Polanska from Cycling UK and Arwa Marchant, the Enrichment and Community Teaching Assistant from St Margaret’s C of E Primary in Whalley Range, then provided some insightful information on running ‘bike trains’ and ‘walking buses’.
Due to their location, it’s not always feasible for schools to have a School Street, so learning more about other behaviour change interventions was invaluable.
Cazz Ward from Walk Ride GM followed on with an in-depth talk on how to enforce a School Street, and our final speaker was Steve Marsland, the headteacher at Russell Scott Primary in Denton, who gave a fascinating talk on their junior ‘PCSO’ scheme and how their pupils worked to ‘pull up’ and ‘ticket’ parents for bad driving and parking behaviour around their school.
You can find the recordings of the sessions on our YouTube channel.
We followed this with opportunities for small discussions with our experts, including officers from Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) who are responsible for the delivery of the GM School Street programme. Participants came away with lots of tips and ideas to make walking and wheeling to school easier and more appealing. We also gave everyone a practical toolkit at the end of the conference to help them get started.
Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s (GMCA) Home to School Travel strategy was approved at the end of May 2025. Goals for 2030 include:
- 70% of primary school, 80% of secondary school and 80% of further education students walking, wheeling, scooting or cycling to school
- 100 School Streets across GM, not enforced by volunteers
They now need to fund and develop a delivery programme to implement the strategy.
We fully support the strategy, but believe there needs to be more opportunities for both schools and council officers to connect and learn from each other. There is a huge amount of support for schools from a variety of organisations including Transport for Greater Manchester, Living Streets, Mums for Lungs, Cycling UK and ourselves at Walk Ride. But it’s not joined up and most schools just don’t have the time and capacity to work out where or how to access support. There are also a number of schools that already have plenty of experience of running School Streets and other inventions and would be more than willing to share their learning.
We ran this conference to bring everyone together and start to facilitate this collaboration. We decided to start with a small pilot, so that we could learn how best to deliver it, before we run a bigger version of the conference later in the year. The practical format worked really well, so we aim to expand on that for the next conference on 16 October 2025. You can book your place via this link now!
And while you are here, listen to our podcast on School Streets with Chris Silk, the deputy head of St Thomas CE Primary School in Stockport.