NOF welcomes the £37.5m funding announced to boost active travel: £30m going to the Active Travel Consortium [ATC], and £7.5m to the Travelling to School Project. 

The £30 funds a four year project to help give currently inactive people the practical support they need to walk and cycle as part of their everyday life: cycling monitoring schemes to get adults out of their cars and children to walk to school.

 

The £7.5m is an extension of the annual package of Government funding to help boost sustainable travel to school.  It will provide continued support for the network of local authority based school travel advisers. As part of their work, school travel plan advisors work with the national Walk to School campaign, run by Living Streets [partners with NOF] and Travelwise.

 

NOF hopes that 45,000 of those schoolbound children will be measuring their steps when given pedometers from September onwards.  The children will be attending 250 primary and specialist schools in the UK’s more deprived areas and the distribution of these gadgets is another Department of Health initiative to tackle obesity.   Allegedly, feasibility studies have shown that wearing pedometers encourages physical activity – so shouldn’t we expect every pupil to get one when this batch of 45,000 run out in March?