How did you hear about the Award? It was a new initiative to create a 'School Travel' Plan. It involved investigating how pupils and teachers from Putney get to and from school and problems encountered with getting to and from school. It was about how to make Putney more sustainable in relation to transport.
 
Why you are so interested in it? The idea behind the project is sustainabily and since we are keen Geographers, we volunteered to take part in the project as this subject links back to Geography. As sustainability is such an important concept in today's society we thought it would be exciting, yet also useful to take part in this project and to try and make a difference to Putney.
 
What are the solutions that you suggested? Some of the solutions included encouraging car sharing (pupils and teachers), and cycle sheds to encourage cycling.
 
What happened at the Oval? At the Oval all the schools that had undertaken successful travel plans were invited to take part in workshops, talks and eventually the presentation of the sustainability award. There were a mixture of primary and secondary schools, although there were more primary schools which showed that not many secondary schools have a travel plan, making it a real achievement for Putney.  Ideas of sustainability were discussed such as how to encourage children and teenagers to walk or take public transport to school. At the workshops we created a travel plan for a fictional school in groups, putting forward solutions to their problems, and then did a presentation about it to the whole of the Travel Plan attendees.
 
Why you think the travel plan is important? A travel plan is crucial to a school as it is a driving force in helping to encourage more sustainable methods of getting to school and back which are essential in order to help make Putney a more sustainable school. It helps to identify areas of weaknesses, such as too many people getting a lift to school and it enables these problems to be tackled. The meetings also provided time to discuss other ideas and other related problems, such as anti social behaviour on public transport and views can be aired.