Collecting good evidence can derisk delivery around schools

Working with teachers to engage with pupils and the community to create safer spaces around schools should be on more to-do lists, says Cllr Tom Bailey

As a Councillor, having schools in your ward focuses the mind on road safety.  Here in Tynemouth we’ve got the usual selection of primary schools that you’d expect for a place with a population of over 10,000 people.  Through accident of geography and the whims of the boundary commission, we’ve also got three secondary schools: Kings Priory which takes 5-18, Marden High and John Spence (pop star Sam Fender’s alma mater) which both educate kids 11-16.

Given the size of secondary school communities, a Councillor tends to hear surprisingly little right up until the moment that something goes wrong and a child is involved in a collision.  Secondaries have big catchments. Who is even responsible for making sure these younger residents get listened to?  

One of the first things I did after being elected was go and see the headteachers and start a conversation about how we could work together and give pupils a stronger voice.  Both Marden High and John Spence had a very similar vision.  Both view the sense of place and “arrival” at school as an important part of the school’s identity and how it sets the tone for students’ day.

We used a paper survey on problem points on the journey to school and also locations where students are concerned for others. The pupils themselves were asked for advice on how we could scale that up to the whole school

North Tyneside transport has a great schools team and, although very busy working in primaries, they agreed to have a crack at engaging with a couple of classes at Marden High.  This is where we hit the first problem.

The size of a typical secondary school means the work involved in writing up and mapping results is just too much given the time available.

To try to solve this, I enlisted the help of the Head teacher and one of the Deputies from John Spence, Jonathan Heath and Kate Winder, plus a small focus group covering the complete age range at the school. We used a paper survey on problem points on the journey to school and also locations where students are concerned for others. The pupils themselves were asked for advice on how we could scale that up to the whole school.

Just as with Marden, there’s a difficult challenge of getting pupils to articulate a precise location and then being able to decipher that in recording results. People don’t necessarily think in terms of street names.  Locations may have nicknames like “the alleyway”, or be described by a local landmark.  

In looking at what the focus group came up with, the thing that came to mind was a “bus driver’s map”. Until satnav came along, drivers would learn routes as a set of pictures of turning points named after landmarks at each turn.  

We photographed a set of locations each with a landmark in the background each given a short name such as “The Sportsman”, “Tesco”, “The Three Sails”, “Morrisons”, “Cemetery” etc.  This set of photos, displayed on a whiteboard combined with an online questionnaire that kids could complete on their phone, gave the school something that they could deliver easily and quicky in class where results collated themselves instantly. The end result was around 300 responses.

Needless to say, an initiative like this throws out some challenges.  There’s some money earmarked this year to improve a couple of crossings near the school, but when you map the concerns of a big group it throws up much more than that.

For anyone familiar with transport and highways, timescales alone are a problem.  In a school like John Spence the entire student body will roll over every five years.  Often highways projects can take years to pull together.  There’s a basic disconnect between how time works inside the school gates vs. outside on the highway.

What I’d like to do next is get the same approach rolled out in other secondary schools, including the other two in my ward.  But for a local authority, engagement is often funded out of capital scheme budgets, so no planned scheme can mean that there are no funds for engagement .  

The idea of going out and deliberately engaging with any group of residents when you don’t necessarily have the funds to respond is a difficult sell.

Personally, I think that Councillors should treat school communities just as they would any other “hard to reach” group in a ward.  If there are people out there less likely to engage or respond to consultations then elected officials have a responsibility to solve that.  

For a local authority, despite the challenges, engaging with secondaries is a potential goldmine when it comes to infrastructure planning, and evidencing the need and benefits of highways schemes.  Sadly, we lost one highway investment scheme near John Spence in 2024.  I’m struck by how different that outcome might have been both in terms of scheme design and being able to demonstrate public demand, if we’d have had a few hundred engagement responses from pupils early in the process.

Too often, public engagement exercises become dominated by a relatively small group of people who may not want change to happen.  Good early engagement, be it with school kids or everyone else, derisks delivery and makes, in the long run, for better streets.

Headteachers are generally impressive, capable and moral people, and arming them with a solid set of evidence is frankly not a bad thing to be doing.  What we did at John Spence could be replicated very easily by schools elsewhere, ideally with support from a transport planner.  This might be something for me to pitch to the North East’s next Active Travel Commissioner?