Cycling initiatives

Our Transport Planning and Safety Education teams work closely to offer schools a variety of schemes, projects and campaigns around cycling that help promote and encourage healthy, safe and active travel to school.

The Big Pedal (all schools)

Richmond encourages all schools to take part in the Sustrans Big Pedal event. This will launch on the Wednesday 22 April and will run until Tuesday 5 May 2020. It includes pedestrian and scooter travel and counts towards your STARS accreditation.

• Visit The Big Pedal for more information

This years’ event was very positive and three of our schools reached the top 20 national league table. Barnes Primary were our top pedalling school achieving the seventh place overall for large primary schools – well done!

We would love to see all our schools registered for this years’ event, getting active, healthy and having some fun too. We will send details to schools closer to the time, so save the date!

Bike Week (all schools)

Bike Week is an annual celebration in June to promote cycling and show the community how easily cycling can become a part of everyday life.

To celebrate the week your school could host a number of events including: a biker’s breakfast, a sponsored cycle ride, cycling competition, a cycle to school day for staff or bike security marking and each of these activities would help you to achieve the higher levels of accreditation for STARS your travel plan and could be funded through the small grants scheme. Many more options can be found in STARS (within the circular cycling icon) for you to consider running as part of your Bike Week celebrations.

Bikeability (primary schools)

Our team of qualified instructors work year-round to provide free Bikeability training to all Year 6 pupils in the borough.

For more information on cyclist training please visit our Cycling in schools pages and don’t forget this also counts towards your STARS accreditation.

• View Bikeability training for more details

Scooter training (primary schools)

Safe Scooter training is available for Year 2 children. Children learn about:

• Safety checks
• Safe and sensible braking techniques
• Consideration and courtesy to other pavement users
• Making sensible decisions on or near roads and driveways

Second Hand bike Markets (all schools)

Annually, Richmond Council offers schools the opportunity to run a second-hand bike market at the school. These are very popular with parents and carers, giving them an opportunity to sell an unwanted bike and/or purchase a new, serviced bike very cheaply.

We had such positive feedback from the schools and parents/carers who took part last year that we are repeating the initiative this year again. There is very little for the school to do. All the promotional material has been created and designed and just need distributing to the parents/carers and the selling team will need a space from which to operate.

If you are interested in holding this very popular LA sponsored event this year, please do not hesitate to contact the School Travel Advisor.

As with all our initiatives it also counts towards your STARS accreditation. Further information is available on Other cycling activity (TfL).