NEWS: Children put their best foot forward and win award

By Alison Holland

Published: July 20, 2021

Pupils at one Kettering school are celebrating after being crowned Northamptonshire’s school of the year in a national award ceremony.

The STARS awards, which rewards and celebrates schools that are embracing safe, sustainable travel, crowned Grange Primary School the 'School of the Local Authority' at its recent awards ceremony, with judges describing the primary school as ‘excellent’ and congratulating staff, parents and pupils for their commitment to promoting cycling, walking and other forms of sustainable and active travel.

Lydia Meek, deputy head at Grange Primary School, said: “Brightwayz has been supporting us with our active travel planning and has given our young road safety heroes a real focus and direction – and we are proud to be recognised for all our hard work. Thanks to their continued support we are now looking at some other ideas, which we are confident this will help us achieve our longer-term healthy living goals. This is just the beginning.”

Grange Primary School particularly impressed judges by taking part in a UK Road Safety Hero scheme, self-funding a travel plan and becoming Northamptonshire’s first school to take part in the Brightwayz ST:EPS scheme (Safe Travel: Enabling Pupils and Schools) and the first to achieve Modeshift STARS accreditations.

Grange primary academy.

We have been supporting Grange Primary School to achieve accreditation. Alison Holland said: “Our focus is on inspiring safe, active, sustainable travel for everyone and we are constantly impressed with the passion, commitment and dedication of the whole team at Grange Primary School. A huge congratulations.

“Active travel and road safety has been a priority for this school for many years, with all staff constantly looking for and coming up with new ideas of how to engage pupils and parents in active travel. The whole school community is involved and the STARS judges were impressed by the school’s committed year 5 and 6 Road Safety Heroes.”

Finally before you go, if you work in active travel engagement or road safety education - for any ages - take a look at our full product range over on our Brightkidz site as we'd love to help support your campaigns. Brightwayz social enterprise is funded by sales income from our amazing products with all profits ploughed back to meet our aims of promoting safe, active, sustainable everyday travel for all.