We work with local primary schools to promote active transport and give children and parents the confidence and skills to walk, ride and scoot to school.
The New Deal for Schools program is Council’s flagship behavioural change initiative in Yarra’s Transport Strategy 2022-2032. [ PDF, 2.52 MB]
The aim of the program is to provide children and parents with the confidence and skills to walk, ride, and scoot to school.
Each year, one school is selected to work with Council to design a schedule of activities that focus on building students’ skills and creating calmer and safer commuting environments for the whole community.
Past participants in the program have included Alphington Primary School (2023-24) and Princes Hill Primary School (2024-25).
The New Deal for Schools program can involve a variety of activities for participants. These include:
Involves temporarily closing roads for cars during school drop off and pick up times. This provides a safe environment around the school gate and reclaims space for kids to play. On open streets days, young people and their families are encouraged to walk, ride and scoot to school.
Bike education can be delivered with all levels of riders from beginners to advance. Training builds cycling skills, riding knowledge and practice to increase rider confidence for young people and their parents and guardians.
Professional mechanics come to the school to check, fix and make bikes safe for use before any event or activity.
As part of the program, Council encourages and supports schools to promote national Ride2School day and will often organise other activities to coincide with that day such as Walking School Buses or Open Streets day.
A Workshop with students to identify key safe routes to and from school. Along these paths, uniquely designed colourful decals will be placed at various distances on the route to guide and be used as check points. A user friendly map will be produced and shared with the school.
A guided group commute on key travel routes to and from school can be organised and is a fun and safe method to commute together. Examples are Walking School Bus program and Bike Trains.
We identify students’ travel routes to school and complete an audit. From this, we identify opportunities to improve existing signage and infrastructure to make it safer and more accessible for people to walk, cycle, scoot and use public transport to travel to school.
We will regularly survey young people and their families on their travel habits via ‘Hands Up’ surveys.
There will also be other surveys and information distributed to find out more about opportunities to support more people to walk, ride, and scoot to school.