Schools Air Quality Programmes and School Streets Support

As air pollution is a major health concern for urban areas worldwide, we work with local authorities to provide Public Realm consultancy to produce effective behaviour change programmes and projects for schools and communities. We focus on Air Quality awareness and encourage travel and lifestyle behaviour changes that support improvements in health and well-being.

School engagement – we start our projects by engaging with a school to explore and identify travel and transport issues and developing solutions that will work for their community.

Pupil-Led – we believe in the power of curiosity to encourage pupils to participate. We involve pupils in real science experiments and then support them with designing a publicity campaign to engage the whole school community.

Quality resources – we use high quality bespoke lesson plans which link to the National Curriculum and produce attractive promotional resources.

Pupils then devise ways to promote these resources. From on-street campaigns and assembly presentations to treasure hunts and video adverts – we harness pupils creativity to effectively spread active travel and Air Quality messages.

PWLC Projects have delivered Air Quality programmes for Croydon Greenwich, Hackney, Haringey, Havering, Islington, Redbridge, Southwark, and Sutton. Our programmes are bespoke for each contracting authority, and are usually amended for each school depending on their capacity, travel and transport issues, and which age group the school would like to participate. Our programmes often include workshops, lessons, assemblies, theatre, drama and outdoor education, inspiring pupils to participate and learn.

Community involvement - through pupil engagement we find the school takes greater ownership of the campaign resulting in parents, staff and governors being more likely to take notice of the communications and get involved. Former BBC weather presenter Helen Young often kicks off our projects with a whole school assembly so that the whole school community knows what is happening and why.

These projects support an increase in pupil and parent knowledge and awareness about air pollution including protection strategies which help reduce their exposure to pollutants.

Results from our previous projects show an average increase in knowledge acquisition of up to 35%.

We have seen the number of pupils travelling to school by car reduce by as much as 9%.

We usually see 90%+ of pupils either ‘liked’ having been involved in our projects or ‘liked it a lot’.