June update

We have been busy raising awareness of the importance of Bikeability training in parliament, focussed on securing future funding. We are in much better position than ever before due to the new data and information flowing from digitisation, so if you haven’t yet onboarded, the impact you are making isn’t included in our reporting – so it’s vital we have all the industry onboard.  

Policy and Public Affairs is making a difference

On 19 May, we launched our joint Road Safety Report with Living Streets at the All Party Parliamentary Group for Cycling & Walking (APPGCW) meeting. Our report calls for urgent reform of the training and safety standards for all road users, including: 

• Bikeability on the National Curriculum 
• Investment in the Highway Code campaign 
• A dedicated Routes to School Fund 

As the largest provider of road safety education in the country, we’re pleased that the report and our recommendations to the Government were well received by the MPs who attended. You can read the report here and watch the session here. 

We now have over 100 parliamentary champions asking questions and raising awareness around Bikeability training. We work with these MP’s to raise awareness but push our policy priorities like getting Bikeability on the curriculum.  

Within the last two weeks we worked with one of our champions, Julia Buckley MP from Shrewsbury to submit a written question to Education ministers: 

“To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of including cycle training in the national curriculum”, and we were delighted to receive the following response from Catherine McKinnell MP, Minister of State (Education): 

“Schools are best placed and have the flexibility to decide on the activities they provide to deliver a rounded and enriching education to suit their pupils’ needs. This includes cycling training programmes such as Bikeability. Physical education (PE) is a foundation subject in the national curriculum and compulsory at all four key stages. 

The department welcomes the opportunity for continued collaboration with Bikeability to create sustainable improvements in physical activity for young people, including through active travel and promoting the overall wellbeing benefits of physical activity, such as through cycling.” 

With the forthcoming curriculum and assessment review, in addition to the focus on life skills education, we’ll continue to push Bikeability training as an essential part of education in the UK. 

Our parliamentary champions work, will lead to increased opportunity for MP visits during Cycle to School Week, taking place between 13 to 17 October. We are now running a list of MP’s who are keen to visit, so we would encourage you to book as many sessions in that week with schools, so we can offer a visit for your MP during Cycle to School Week so that they can observe the amazing training you provide. 

Future funding

It’s really important that you engage with the forecasting process for this financial year and release funds early to enable others to use it. We need you to be realistic about what you can deliver so we avoid giving back funding late. We can move funds and offer widening participation if we are made aware earlier in the process.  

The outcome of the Spending Review will be announced in parliament on June 11th, but the confirmations for Bikeability won’t be shared until business planning is concluded at DfT. To set expectations, this is expected to take a number of weeks, and we will not be able to give any grant recipient news until this is concluded. We continue to push for early confirmations and do expect a multi year settlement.  

Programme objectives 

As you know, the Trust is obligated to report on the ongoing impact of the Bikeability programme. We use data that is collected via Digitisation to do this. This data collection began in 2024/25 and is currently being used in the first phase of our 3-phase reporting plan.  

Phase 1 is now complete and focussed on data derived from both pre and post-training sources, including consent forms, hands-up surveys, parent/carer surveys and Bikeability Club. The key themes it covers are cycling frequency, parental confidence and encouragement of their child cycling, riders’ own feelings of confidence and safety. You can see the interim report here. 

Phase 2 is now underway and will track rider-specific responses from pre to post-training, and presents comparisons between pre and post-training responses. It focuses on the key themes such as cycling frequency, rider outcomes, experience and intention of cycling on the roads. This will help us to see trends and make decisions about reviewing funding, guidance and training for instructors. We expect to conclude Phase 2 in the winter.  

Phase 3 will begin in the Autumn and will involve conducting a standalone longitudinal study using insights from the prior two phases and further research to understand the impact of Bikeability outcomes on family cycling activity.  

We now have over 200,000 surveys completed via the Instructor App to report on outcomes, and over 2000 post-training responses. This enables us to set a baseline to show the impact that Bikeability has on intention and frequency to cycle for school, health and leisure. We will be measured against this in future years, and this data will feed into Active Travel England’s wider work around targets for walking and cycling through their behaviour change portfolio. We will release details of this in the next few weeks.  

To meet these objectives, we need all Training Providers to onboard Digitisation so that instructors are collecting this data via the Instructor App. Any Training Providers who have not completed their Digitisation onboarding by 1st Sept will be deregistered.  

We are showing how Bikeability is an effective programme for Government through our increased scrutiny, focus on quality and improved reporting. You are part of team Bikeability and working with us to deliver the best we can for children in our joint mission. Thank you.