Travel Smart

As a school we are dedicated to improving pupils health, wellbeing and safety. We are now at the start of an exciting new journey for Hilltop as we strive to achieve our bronze, silver and gold Modeshift star awards.

As part of our work, we will be writing a new travel plan to support our families with healthy and safe ways of travelling to school. This is for a number of reasons, all involving the health of our children.

Firstly, Ashbourne has one of the highest rates of air pollution in Derbyshire. The schools locally all have raised levels of air pollution due to the roads around the town. We hope that by implementing simple, sustainable initiatives for staff, pupils and parents we can positively impact on this, in turn reducing the amount of harmful substances being breathed in by our children.

Secondly, the roads around school become very busy during drop off and pick up times, which sometimes causes safety concerns for our families and parking problems for our neighbours. Through promoting sustainable ways of travelling to school we will impact on this significantly.

Finally, we are always striving to find new ways to promote healthy lifestyles for our families. By encouraging families to share a scooter journey or walk to school we know we can boost the amount of exercise our children get each day.

As we go further through our journey you will hear more about improvements and initiatives designed to make our school a healthier place to be for our community. We have already signed up to Modeshift Stars and completed our first new initiative when Rob from the Derbyshire Sustainable Travel Team took every class in school through a Scooter Smart session. During this time the children learned how to ride their scooters, control them, balance on them and how to use them safely when on public pavements or crossing roads. Ask your child about their scooter smart learning!