These are escorted walking groups using volunteers to supervise the children along a predertermined route.
As part of encouraging sustainable travel to school they can be a high profile way of raising awareness and encourageing children and parents to leave the car at home and walk to school.
If you want to set up a walking bus there are several things you need to consider:
- Recruit volunteers - enough to cover the routes you want to use, for absence/illness and for a safe ratio of adults to children. These can be parents, grandparents or any person wishing to help, having had a CRB check
- Carry out the appropriate checks on those volunteers
- Plan the routes and times of the walking buses
- Purchase high visibility clothing and appropriate trolley for carrying bags (your road safety officer should be able to help with suppliers)
- Ensure you have parents' consent for their children to use the walking bus and obtain any necessary insurance
- Volunteers should be trained - again the road safety officer should be able to advise
- Consider a reward system for those taking part.
These guidelines will help get you started.
)
There are a number of other documents, such as parent/child agreements, registers, medical check forms and risk assessments that you will need to use. Please contact the Road Safety Team on 01724 297346 for details of these and other information you may need.
Please note: The above document is in Portable Document Format (PDF). You will need a suitable reader to view it. A reader can be downloaded free from the Adobe website (full instructions for downloading the reader are provided on the site).