Introducing our Student Leaders

At Assembly on National Ride to School Day I took the stage to introduce the 2023 Your Move Student Leaders and promote the Your Move program to the whole school community.

In preparation for my presentation, while the school was singing the school song, I popped out with another parent to count the bikes and scooters parked outside the hall. I did a quick calculation based on how many students are in PP to Yr 6 and noted it down.

When the Your Move Student Leaders and I took the stage at assembly, I started by asking the audience to raise their hands if they rode their bikes to school today – so many hands shot in the air that there were gasps of astonishment from parents, teachers and special guests.

When the audience had settled down I asked the riders to keep their hands up and asked those who scooted to school to also raise their hands – more hands again rose into the air. I repeated this for those who skated and more hands went up. I asked all the ‘wheelers’ to keep their hands in the air while I shared the numbers that I had counted earlier:

• Bikes: 58
• Scooters: 35
• Skates: 2 pairs
• Skateboards:1
• TOTAL: 96 out 166

That is 60% or 3 out of every 5 students either rode, scooted or skated to school. I then asked for those who walked to school to raise their hand too. By now there so many hands in the air that it was difficult to know if anyone still had their hands in their laps. I asked them all to give themselves a pat on their back for their efforts.

It was a simple way to showcase to the community what the Your Move program is about. Additionally, the Your Move Student Leaders were able to see first hand how their planning and execution of the event day had positively influenced their peers behaviour. (We now have confirmation via our official hands up survey that we achieved an incredible 68% total AT rate for the day!)

Before officially introducing the team, I gave a brief explanation of the Your Move Program objectives and benefits. I spoke about the team selection process and revealed how many applications we received before selecting the most creative and enthusiastic applicants. Hopefully inspiring the younger year groups to strive to become Student Leaders. I introduced the Student Leaders to the whole school community and shared some of the innovative ideas that the successful students submitted in their applications. As I shared each one, I again asked for the audience to raise their hands, this time to indictate if they liked the ideas.

• Lunch time bike days - if you ride to school on a particular day, then you can ride at lunch
• Walking school buses along Gallipoli st and Newey st – parents share the load
• Active travel points jars for each class, highest class gets a reward
• Set up regular treasure hunts on the way to school
• Bike, scooter & walking lapathon

There was a lot of engagement with the ad hoc survey, with parents even raising their hands at the idea of a Walking School Bus. Not only was this highlighting the possibilities of the Your Move program to the school, it also gave the Student Team an opportunity to see how excited their peers were by their innovative ideas. It also gave us an indication of which ideas were most popular so that we could tackle them first.

To wrap up the presentation I shared with the school the team motto that the Student Leaders decided on in our first meeting “Spread Active Travel Fever” – to get everyone as excited about active travel as they are!

The student team left the stage to a big round of applause, exhilarated by the sense that the ATF infection is indeed spreading.