Schools are already doing brilliant things for active travel. Walk to School weeks, cycling campaigns, travel champions working hard to shift the dial. The effort and enthusiasm is real. The only thing most schools are missing is a way to join those moments up, so the energy from each one builds into something visible and lasting.
The good news is that's a timing question, not a workload one.
Run three or four short challenges across the school year at the right points, use Love to Ride's school platform to capture the picture each time, and by July you have something genuinely powerful: a coherent data story showing how your school moved (literally) across twelve months. Mode by mode. Class by class. Year on year.
That's the offer. Here's why it works.
Short bursts, properly spaced, are what the research supports
The evidence on school active travel is consistent: single events don't change habits, but repeated, spaced interventions do. The U.S. Community Guide's review of 52 programmes found that active travel to school increased by a median of 5.9 percentage points where sustained interventions were used, rising to 6.5 percentage points for Safe Routes to School programmes. Longer follow-up produced stronger results.
This isn't a case for running a constant programme. It's a case for showing up a few times a year, at the right moments, so each challenge builds on the last. Three or four campaigns, each lasting three to four weeks, gives you exactly that.
What Love to Ride brings to each challenge
Each challenge on the Love to Ride school platform is a self-contained event with a start date, an end date, and a live competition tracking walking, cycling, scooting and public transport across every class in your school. Teachers log a simple weekly count — hands up, mode by mode, done in under five minutes. From there, the platform takes care of leaderboards, badges, streak tracking, impact calculations and a shareable results summary that's ready the moment the challenge ends.
Between challenges, a single weekly class check-in keeps the data picture building. No complex setup. No ongoing admin. Just another data point added to your school's story: participation rate, mode share, regular active travellers, car trips avoided. Stack three or four challenges across the year and you don't just have snapshots. You have a trend.
Timing is everything, and it's different by region
The strongest challenges land in the windows when active travel is already most appealing: mild weather, settled term routines, and ideally alongside a national moment like the UK's Big Walk and Wheel, the USA's Walk & Roll to School Day, or Australia's Ride2School Day. Aligning a Love to Ride challenge with these gives you the energy of a national campaign and your own school-level data at the same time.
The interactive below maps the recommended windows for your region: when to go big, when to keep it light, and how it all fits your school year.
The seasonal logic is backed by research. UK evidence shows children are meaningfully more active on longer, milder days, and that weather shapes active school travel just as much as it shapes recreational activity. A short January reset absolutely has its place. But your biggest push deserves your best conditions.
What you end up with
After three or four challenges and a year of light-touch weekly logging, Love to Ride gives your school a complete active travel picture: participation across each campaign, mode share across the year, where habits strengthened, and a clear impact summary of trips logged, car journeys replaced and CO₂ saved. That's ready to go straight into a governor report, a local authority submission or a trust dashboard.
This is what most schools are genuinely missing. Not enthusiasm — travel champions have plenty of that. Not effort either. What's hard to come by is comparable data from consistent time points that makes improvement visible, reportable and believable. The research literature repeatedly flags this as the critical gap in school active travel evidence. Love to Ride's platform exists to close it.
In practice, it's simpler than it sounds
A September challenge to rebuild the habit after summer. A mid-year booster timed to your region's best weather. A spring push alongside a national campaign moment. Between each one, a weekly class check-in that takes less time than the register.
By the end of the year, you haven't ground through a programme. You've built something better: a genuine, evidence-backed story of how your school community chose to travel differently. And you have the numbers to prove it.
Love to Ride's school platform is free to join for schools and available to local authorities and programme partners. Get started at schools.lovetoride.net.