Starting an informal walk-to-school group

This information is for those of you who can’t or don’t want to organise an ‘official’ Walking School Bus.

The aim of the Walking School Bus is to get more children walking to school. But if you can’t get a full program organised, try walking your kids to school yourself or share walking or cycling to school with nearby parents you know and trust.

In some communities it may be easier for families to work together and come up with their own solutions to getting their children walking, cycling, and skating to school.

This may be as simple as neighbourhood parents drawing up a roster where they agree to cover between them all trips to and from school. For example, if five families work together, each family would be responsible for one day of the week. Through this approach, parents gain time and avoid the morning rush on the days they don’t walk children to school.

If parents walk and cycle with their young children, these children are more likely to walk and cycle, gaining independent mobility, as they mature. Children develop at different rates and have different abilities – they learn by example and by doing and from parents.

Teaching children traffic sense requires a supervised, incremental approach. Parents and other close adults are best placed to know their children’s abilities and capacity to learn. With the right support, children can be taught road safety so that, at a suitable age, they can use active transport to travel independently to school and around the neighbourhood.

If you do not know your neighbours or other families in the area with schoolchildren, you could:

• Organise a street party with your neighbours, eg a street Christmas party. Getting to know your neighbours will not only give you a chance to identify with other families in the street, it will also develop a sense of social connection within your local community.
• Conduct a letter drop: ask others in the local neighbourhood whether they have children attending the same school and if they are interested in sharing walks.
• Once you have some other parents in your local area interested, you can then work out when it suits each parent to walk. Or perhaps you can walk together with other families.

Swedish ‘walk-bus’

In Sweden, many suburbs of Stockholm have adopted walk-buses which are a much more informal and less complicated approach than the Walking School Bus program. Members of some walk-buses meet an agreed starting point, and then walk together to school. Others use the traditional method of picking up children from their homes as they go.

Red Sneaker Routes

These involve children finding their way to school by themselves (not necessarily by the shortest route). Instead of adults walking the whole way, as with the traditional Walking School Bus, various adults (eg, parents at houses along the way) provide surveillance of the route for very short sections of it. They signify that their house is part of the route by putting a red sneaker on their front gate or fence.

Children gain confidence walking by themselves, but have the added reassurance of knowing that trustworthy adults are checking their progress along the way.

For more information, see David Engwicht’s article. 'Red Sneaker Routes’ is another of his suggestions for getting kids more active in going to school.