The School Streets programme is an initiative implemented across Greater Manchester that aims to transform the school run by creating safer, more pleasant environments around schools. A school street typically involves restricting access to motorised vehicles on roads outside schools during drop-off and pick-up times, making these areas predominantly pedestrian zones.
The programme is designed to encourage children to walk, wheel, scoot, or cycle to school safely while reducing traffic congestion, improving air quality, and creating a more child-friendly environment near schools.
The restrictions typically apply only during school start and finish times, while still ensuring that residents, local businesses, and blue badge holders can maintain access to the streets.
The research was commissioned to better understand the impact of school streets on travel behaviours, safety, and local communities, addressing the challenge of reducing car dependency, busy and dangerous streets and improving the school run experience for families across Greater Manchester.
To ensure a comprehensive understanding of the programme’s impact, Temple engaged a wide variety of stakeholders, each with varying levels of involvement in the scheme. This approach allowed for diverse feedback, ensuring the Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) received a broad perspective on the programme’s efficiency and outcomes. Our approach to the research and community engagement operated at three main stages: fact-finding calls, in-depth interviews, and focus groups.
Firstly, fact-finding calls were conducted through online meetings with stakeholders from specific local authority districts identified by Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) to further identify key participants for in-depth interviews. This was also completed to ensure stakeholders had a clearer understanding of the monitoring and evaluation project. These participants had varying degrees of responsibility but had direct involvement with the programme.
Following the fact-finding calls, seven in-depth interview sessions were held via online meetings with key local authority school streets contacts, as well as those identified during the fact-finding call stage. These provided deeper insights into the programme’s implementation, revealing the nuances of its successes and the challenges it faced.
Finally, six focus groups across schools in different Greater Manchester Local Authorities were undertaken. Selected participants included parents, carers, staff, residents in the area and volunteer marshals, who would be affected by the programme implementation. This provided invaluable ‘on the ground’ feedback and practical insights which might not have been obtained from previous research methods. The inclusion of these voices was crucial to Temple’s research for TfGM, creating a clearer picture of those affected by the programme whilst highlighting areas for improvement and optimising the delivery of future initiatives.
Our evidence-based evaluation identified critical implementation challenges, including volunteer sustainability issues and communication gaps between local authorities and schools. We documented where school streets successfully improved safety and community atmosphere, while also highlighting situations where problems were displaced rather than solved.
Temple’s key recommendations included:
Beyond practical insights, we ensured social value through inclusive participation approaches and elevated diverse perspectives from those directly experiencing the programme. Our recommendations led to a new project specifically focused on children’s views of the initiative.
This comprehensive evaluation has equipped TfGM with the insights needed to enhance school streets implementation, providing a clear pathway toward creating safer, healthier and more sustainable school environments across Greater Manchester.