School Travel Health Check (STHC) Service

On the 29th July 2011 the English Department for Education announced that, in order to “reduce bureaucracy”, Pupil Usual Mode of Travel had been immediately dropped as a data field from the English National School Census (see the full story in this part of the website). Although they couldn’t stop schools and local authorities from still collecting the data (and there is no technical reason why they can’t as the Mode Of Travel data field remains an operational field in schools information management system software), many took this as a their cue and stopped doing so.

However despite the resultant increase in bureaucracy to themselves, many authorities have made the necessary, alternative arrangements to collect pupil mode of travel data directly from all their schools on an individual basis, academies as well as ones still under their control. They have done this because they appreciate the value of continuing to have an authority-wide view of how pupils travel to school for transport planning and many other purposes.

We therefore continue to offer the School Travel Health Check Service to all UK local authorities. Indeed as is our custom we have adapted and improved the robustness of the STHC process…

• Lack of Pupil Usual Mode of Travel Data from some / all schools in an authority does not prevent us undertaking spatial analysis of the “Pupil-Level” School Census Data (and never has done). All we need to do that is the pupils home postcode, and that will always be collected as part of the School Census.
• This means we can still plot all pupils on a map, and therefore all schools can still visualise where all their pupils are travelling from on the School Map & Charts page on the authorities STHC data Portal. It has always been the case with the STHC that pupils with no recorded mode of travel have been coded as “Unknown (UNK)”, and assigned the “Unknown” symbol on the map.
• This means authorities can still engage simultaneously with all the schools in “their patch” in a consistent, meaningful and constructive way using their own data, irrespective of whether or not they still collect pupil mode of travel data or have a school travel plan.
• Although the resulting analysis output is less rich without the results being broken down by individual pupil mode of travel, it still contains much useful information of value to local authorities that can be used to profile the pupil travel situation in individual schools eg. total and average “actual” travel distance.Thus authorities will still be able to identify the ones where active engagement would potentially yield the best results.

That said we can easily “plug in” alternative sources of pupil travel mode data if they are available, even if it is only at whole school-level rather than individual pupil level. For example the Sustrans Hands Up Survey in Scotland or the ModeShift Stars Survey in the rest of the UK. Although not ideal and a bit of a “half-way house”, these can still be “mashed up” with the pupil maps obtained by spatial analysis of the “Pupil-Level” School Census Data in the portal for great visualisation and at least some quantification.

Thus whilst not exactly “business as usual”, the STHC is still here for those local authorities that appreciate the value of having an authority-wide view of how pupils travel to school. We do appreciate however that during the transition process between collecting regimes, the situation within an authority may be patchy and confused. All we ask is that, when providing their Input Data to us, clients are clear about its completeness and let us know what schools (if any) are missing from it. This will save any unnecessary delay in processing due to data failing initial quality control checks!