Cycle Training

Radio 4 - You and Yours - 13th January 2000

Transcript of programme. John Waite Talking to Ken Spence of the Road Danger Reduction Forum.

JW: ... So in your view the answer is for local authorities to end their reliance as at present on volunteers and instead give cycle training to professional trainers?

KS: Well it's up to the local authorities to decide how they would do that, but I think that in reality you find it very difficult to get volunteers. We had that same situation in York where I work when I joined here 10 years ago and we only had two schools actually offering training, and it was impossible to get volunteers to come forward. The advantage of professionals is you know the quality of what you're going to get, you can set that down.

JW: Well we've got a professional with us, Simeon Bamford from Cycle Training. Who are your customers Simeon?
SB: They're about half adults and half children, about half of them are people who've never learned to cycle in the first place and want us to get them moving, and about half of them are people who can cycle but are nervous about using the roads and want us to teach them on the roads, and in some cases teaching them to ride on their routes to work and back.

JW: So how many lessons on avaerage do they need and what do you charge per hour?

SB: We charge £20 per hour. We can get a complete beginner moving in one hour, and a programme of road training usually consists of two or three sessions.

JW: So you're talking about £60 something like that, which many people will find expensive, but I presume if you make people safe on the roads on two wheels then it's well worth it. What do your clients learn from you that they wouldn't get from being supervised by someone's dad weaving them round the cones in the playground?

SB: When I tell European people that we teach people to ride bikes, they laugh, they think it's crazy, because they all learned from their parents, and they also learned in school, but in London you're approaching the point where a whole generation of parents have grown up not being allowed by their parents to cycle, because it was considered to be becoming too dangerous.

JW: So do you think local authorities can find the money? I mean Ken Spence there was talking of £10,000,000 to pay for professionals like you to train our children to cycle to school.

SB: They're starting to do so. What's happening is various council departments like Environment, Health Promotion, Leisure, Local Agenda 21, are recognising the impasse that Road Safety units are in, both financially and ideologically, and are finding money from their own budgets to contract us to run independent cycle training programmes.

JW: Okay well the government has itself been looking at this subject and there's been a development this very morning. Simon Tillotson reports now from St Thomas of Canterbury Roman Catholic School in Fulham in West London.

ST: This is the school where the departments of Transport, Health and Education have launched the School Travel Advisory Group report. That group was set up to find ways to encourage walking, cycling or taking public transport to school. I asked Transport Minister Keith Hill what he thought the most important recommendations were.

KH: I think one of the most interesting aspects of the report is the need for in-school provision to actually make it easier to get to school by bus by bike or by walking, for example, children have to carry the most enormous number of books around. It's very difficult to cycle to school with a great rucksack on your back, it's very difficult to walk to school with a great rucksack on your back, so one of the practical little things that STAG are recommending is the provision of far more lockers in school so that children can leave their books in school overnight and make it easier for them to get to school, and well be looking at means of providing some support for that.

ST: We've been hearing on our programme how there are a number of children who say they'd like to cycle to school but they don't feel they have the confidence to do that because they haven't been trained, they haven't had the on-road training. We've heard a lot this morning about software packages to help children learn about the dangers of the roads. Do you have any plans for improving cycling proficiency training?

KH: Yes we certainly do, and we'd like to see local authorities working with schools to develop cycling training on a much larger scale than is happening at the present time. The fact of the matter is that every year the government dishes out something in the order of a billion pounds to local authorities for their local transport plans. the local transport plans must include an element on school travel plans where we see positive ideas relating to cycling training coming forward then the government will certainly be rewarding local transport authorities for those proposals.

ST: So what can you do to encourage the local authorities to do that? Because you can talk to them, you can make it clear that you want them to come up with cycling proficiency in their travel plans but it seems it's such an important aspect of the training for a child that wants to travel safely to school that you should make special money available for that particular scheme.

KH: Well I'm not sure that that would be a practical proposition but certainly the fact of the matter is that there is money available for local authorities in terms of the local transport plans each year, a lot of money, and what we're looking forward to very much are many more clear proposals which will include cycle training, from local authorities in terms of school travel plans.

ST: One of the things we've been hearing about is how the cycling proficiency used to be carried out in school playgrounds, you'd go round a few bollards and wobble a bit and maybe get your badge maybe not, but maybe a better way of training children to cycle to school would be to take them out on the roads with an instructor, actually get them used to the reality of what they have to face. Would you welcome that sort of approach?

KH: We certainly would. We know that it's being done in various local authorities up and down the country. We'd like to see a good deal more of that being carried out in the future.