Monday 11 May 2009

A successful active travel intervention


McKee et al. (2007) demonstrated that a classroom intervention could result in increased levels of active commuting. This study was concerned primarily with walking to school. The class teacher used the Travelling Green Pack to raise awareness of the benefits of active travel. The results indicated that the children (mean age 9 years) increased distance walked to school significantly from 198m to 772 m, which represents an increase of 389%. This study also reported that car use showed a corresponding fall as the walking to school distance increased during the study. McKee et al reported that after the study intervention that the mean distance pupils walked to school was almost 800m, this took the child on average 12 minutes to walk which as a return journey would equate to 24 minutes of PA per day. This is almost 50% of the PA guidelines for children. The study illustrated the positive effect that active travel can have for children in trying to achieve the current PA recommendations. This appears to be a useful resource to us in the classroom to try and encourage active travel.

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