HC Deb 03 March 2003 vol 400 cc794-5W
Mr. Don Foster

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport if he will list the recommendations to his Department from the School Travel Advisory Group; and what progress has been made towards their implementation in each case. [99768]

Mr. Jamieson

The recommendations of the "School Travel Advisory Group are set out in the "School Travel Advisory Group Report 1998–1999". Copies of the report have been placed in the Libraries of the House.

The recommendations for my Department were for school travel issues to be included in local transport plans; better road safety education; improved enforcement of speed, parking and other traffic regulations; better cycle storage facilities and lockers at schools; affordable bus travel for all children in compulsory education; and special training for bus drivers working with children.

We have asked local authorities to include a school travel strategy, explain how they will work with individual schools to develop school travel plans (STPs) and include targets for reducing the number of children who travel to school by car in their local transport plans. To help local authorities we have provided 57 bursaries to enable them to employ staff to work with schools to develop STPs, and a further 17 for them to employ staff to work jointly with schools and workplaces. Since May 2001 we have been providing up to five days of free site-specific consultancy advice to schools wanting to develop a STP.

We have published free best practice guidance on developing and implementing STPs for both local authorities and schools and a school travel resource pack for schools. (These and other resources are also available on our web site at http://www.localtransport/schooltravel/index.htm). We have held free seminars to disseminate these guidesand to promote partnership working between local highway authorities, Healthy Schools co-ordinators, School Sport co-ordinators, bus operators and others.

To improve child road safety we have published a range of booklets for children and the child road safety pages of our web site include lesson plans for primary and secondary school teachers designed to tie in with the national curriculum; these can be found at http:// wuav.databases.dtt.gov.uk/lessonpians/. We are also spending £10 million over five years for local authorities to pilot a network of child pedestrian training schemes in deprived areas.

To reduce child deaths and injuries we have asked local authorities to pay particular attention in preparing their local road safety strategies to roads around schools and the routes children use to get to school; we have asked them to plan specific measures such as 20 mph zones with traffic calming and safe crossing places if traffic calming is not appropriate.

In recent local transport plan settlements we have allocated increased levels of funding to local authorities for small-scale schemes including road safety and programmes to encourage walking and cycling; these can include the provision of lockers and secure cycle parking. We have also set up the Cycling Projects Fund, to which schools can apply for funding for cycle routes, lockers and secure cycle parking.

We have included best practice guidance on setting up successful operator and local authority discount schemes for children on buses in our best practice guidance for increasing bus use for journeys to school and we also included workshops on how to encourage and work with bus operators successfully in our school travel seminars.

In order to improve relationships between bus drivers and young people we commissioned a training programme for bus drivers. New European standards have been established for the knowledge drivers must have before obtaining a licence to driver a bus or a coach. These include the driver's responsibility in respect of the safety and comfort of passengers including children and the appropriate material has been added to Driving Standards Agency publications.

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