School travel planning

A key element of child road safety is the School Travel Plan. It enables schools to identify and address problems that often form barriers to sustainable travel to school.

Modeshift STARS – The National School Travel Award

Modeshift STARS is a hugely successful and popular national school travel planning system. An easy-to-use online system, it significantly reduces the amount of time and work needed to write and review School Travel Plans.

Over 90 schools and early years settings in Cambridgeshire are already taking part in Modeshift STARS. Schools taking part in Modeshift STARS can expect an average 3% reduction in trips made by car to school.

Modeshift STARS is free of charge. Schools can use the system to update or create travel plans which can be used for planning applications. Support, advice and resources for school travel planning are supplied free of charge to all schools in the county by the Road Safety Education team in Cambridgeshire.

There are many things you can do to achieve targets as set out in your School Travel Plan. The school travel plans booklet below includes links to schemes you can run yourself, as well as schemes provided by external organisations.

Getting started with STARS

For new build schools, we have an interim travel plan document below which you may want to use. It will form the basis for your Modeshift STARS school travel plan which you can create once your site is in use. After site occupation, it is important to have a current travel plan to help your school to continue to promote and support sustainable active travel to school.