First Parent Pledges of 2023

Each term the parents of St Augustine's Primary School are encouraged to make a pledge to assist their children to learn safe active travel behaviours.

We found that in 2022, parents did not engage with the opportunity to pledge via the newsletter or your move mailbox and all pledges submitted were provided through the facebook 'poll' on the P & F facebook page. With this in mind, I did not put a call out in the newsletter this time and only provided a poll on Facebook.

I keep a record of all the pledges in a table on MS Excel in order to track and analyse the pledge behaviour over time. This can help me identify where I can offer support to the school community to increase active travel.

In Term 1, 2023 we have had 54 pledges from 23 individual parents. For 3 of those parents, this was their first time pledging. This term I combined the pledge options of "I will walk to school with my child/ren" and "I will ride to school with my child/ren" to "I will walk, ride or scoot to school with my child/ren". This was a popular choice with more than 60% of respondents pledging to do this. The other most popular choice was to support their children to participate in active travel days, which also had 60% of responding parents pledge toward.

Although we had fewer parents engaged in the pledges this term than we have had previously, the parents who are engaged have pledged toward more goals. Each parent who pledged this term provided an average of 2.35 pledges, compared to an average of 1.6 pledges per parent per term for the year of 2022.

Parent pledges are a great way to inspire parents to change their behaviour around transport issues and encourage safe active travel. It is a great tool in the whole of school approach to promoting active travel.