March update

As it comes to the end of the financial year, it’s a good time to look forward to the next year and beyond. At The Trust, we have been putting a lot of thought into what the future looks like for all of us. 

Our 2035 Strategy

One aspect of this has been our 2035 strategy, which outlines what our aims our for the next 10 years. As many of you will know, we put this strategy together with help, support and suggestions from industry. 

We had an interactive session at our last conference (you can find the resources from the workshop here) and I also ran a series of webinars to collect your views on what the future of Bikeability should be. The resounding message I got from industry is that you want us to be ambitious. Ambitious in our aims to train more people to cycle safely and confidently, to encourage more people to choose cycling for transport, and to tackle the somewhat negative perception of cyclists in the media. 

We have taken all of this on board and come up with what we believe is a robust, achievable and, of course, ambitious strategy for 2025-2035. You can read see the one page top line overview of the strategy in the newsletter, and read the full document here.  

By continuing our work together, we can and will reach even more people with cycle training. As ever we rely on your support to achieve even more to activate a nation of cyclists who can confidently choose active travel. 

Road safety strategy

One way we influence people’s active travel choices and help change the perception of cycling and cyclists, is by contributing to the government’s Road Safety Strategy.  

We are working with our active travel colleagues at Living Streets to put together a report  to provide evidence and recommendations to help shape the strategy’s development.  

As industry experts, and people with huge amounts of experience on our roads, your insights are really valuable. This is our chance to influence future policy to help make roads safer for all of us, so please do make a submission if you are able. 

The deadline for submissions is Tuesday 18 March. You can find out more, including details of how to submit your evidence, here. 

Monitoring and evalution: interim report

We have been working on an interim data report for Active Travel England (ATE) to show the range of data that we are now starting to draw from: 

• Monitoring and evaluation programme data 
• Our public affairs ‘insight briefings’ (used to brief parliamentarians for debates and questions) 
• Our primary data collection (ATE Immersive Reality programme, and joint work with Modeshift ATA’s) 
• Our recent You Gov Polling 

The data is helping us evidence just how effective Bikeability training is. Some of the headline stats from the data are below. 

Children reported they would be more likely to cycle after Bikeability training: 

• 23% increase in intended cycling to school 
• 25% increase in intended cycling for leisure 
• 31% increase in intended cycling for health  

Parents also reported they would be much happier to encourage their children to cycle after Bikeability training: 

• 94% of parents/carers have more confidence in their child cycling on roads 
• 97% will encourage their child to cycle independently  

The data also showed there was a reduction in Killed and Seriously Injured (KSI’s), with increased Level 2 Bikeability training being statistically associated with fewer KSIs, alongside a number of other factors, such as deprivation and traffic levels. 

There was also an increase in childhood wellbeing. Secondary schoolchildren who had completed Bikeability Level 2 training report greater subjective wellbeing than children who had not, on two established measures of wellbeing.  

And it shows a long-term impact. Adults who learn to cycle as a child are 9% more likely to cycle once a week than adults who have not taken part in cycle training. You Gov January 2025, we will share this date in full in future.   

The full monitoring and evaluation interim report will be available later in the year, but we wanted to share with you some of the fantastic stats we’re already seeing. 

These statistics show why digitisation is such an important project we need everyone to be part of. Your data helps us prove that cycle training works, and will allow us to advocate for more funding so we can reach more people. Remember, the deadline for starting to use digitisation is the end of March. You can find lots of help and support on our digitisation page, including the recent webinars and the onboarding packs. 

And of course, keep reaching your targets – every child trained will help!