Green Foot Lining up for a Turn

St Augustine’s regular interclass active travel award ‘the Green Foot’ was featured in every assembly again in Term 3, 2023. The Green Foot is awarded to the class who has the most active travellers and the least amount of students travelling to school by car. The Yr 6 students from the Your Move team run a hands up survey in the week leading up to assembly and make the announcement in front of the whole school community - the winning class is awarded 10 mins of extra play time.

Term 4 might hold a twist for the Green Foot award!

With the momentum of our active travel culture building rapidly, staff and parents have been looking at our current bike storage with sideways glances. It has been overflowing regularly in Term 3, even on the rainy days!

We’ve been starting to wonder if our new facility (our 22/23 Double Platinum Connecting Schools Grant Funded Bike Shelter which is due to be installed any day now!) will be enough to house the pleasing increase in bikes that we are seeing parked each day.

When we surveyed the bike rack usage over a two week period in Term 1, the highest amount of parked bikes on any day was 15. Our CSG shelter is designed to house 28 bikes and 10 scooters, so we felt pretty comfortable that we has space to grow. Now, in Term 3 we are regularly seeing 20-25 bikes parked, even on days of poor weather. We didn’t expect the growth to happen so quickly!

The proposed solution to this ‘good to have problem’ is to keep the current space (which is officially located in the green square when it’s not overflowing) as a reserved parking area for the class who currently holds the Green Foot trophy. It will not only raise the profile, message and impact of the Green Foot but it will also free up the new facility by organically separating out the current class who require the most parking space.