Dott 07

How we move in Scremerston
The Move Me project centred on Scremerston First School in Northumberland. Three miles from Berwick, this small school is a daily hub for 42 children and 34 families. It also has 11 members of staff, including full- and part-time teachers, cleaning, catering and janitorial staff, and is led by an enthusiastic head teacher, Helen Harrison, who was keen for the school to be fully involved in the project.

The school’s many and varied transport needs made it an excellent test case for Dott 07. The project looked at the school community’s mobility needs and explored how they could be better served by combining existing services in smarter ways – for example, the planning of integrated journeys, vehicle sharing, or better use of community vehicles such as minibuses. Ultimately, the project team aimed to design a reliable and sustainable transport service that would help this particular rural community and also provide a model that would work elsewhere.

The project was linked to a wider initiative called RAMP (Rural Access and Mobility Project), which looked at a similar set of issues in the field of healthcare access. Move Me was an excellent opportunity to apply some of the findings from RAMP to a new group of users.


How does Move Me work?
The Move Me project team began by gathering insights from the Scremerston community. David Townson and Richard Telford from live|work, the design and innovation company producing Move Me, developed travel activity packs for the pupils of Scremerston First School to help build a picture of how and why they travelled the way they did.

The packs included seven short tasks, including ‘Me and my family – tell us about you and who you live with’, ‘I like to go... – tell us about places you enjoy going to outside of school time’ and ‘Interview a parent – ask a parent questions all about travel’. Pupils took the packs home and filled them in with the help of their parents. Feedback from the activity packs included the following revelations:

• Most pupils are driven to school either because the bus doesn’t go to their area or they live too far away.

• 72% of parents thought the school should encourage less use of cars for school journeys.

• 57% of parents never take the children of other families to school.

• 69% of parents who never take children from other families to school would consider it.

Major problem areas included: infrequency of buses; the limited service of the current school bus run; the expense of taxis; unfair fares; and confusing public transport timeg to and from schools, afterschool clubs, Sure Start classes, dental appointments atables. The questions also unearthed a variety of individual problems with gettinnd the town facilities at Berwick, such as clinics and shops.


Having gathered the information, the live|work team started to develop solutions that would not involve putting any new vehicles on the road. In April, they met with the community to discuss their ideas and highlight their own solutions.

Two early solutions were developed from the initial research:

• Improve existing bus services. Arriva, a local bus provider, worked with live|work and the community to improve its service by introducing a new user-friendly, colour-coded bus timetable.

• Create a toolkit for service providers: the kit consists of a number of simple paper-based tools that aim to help providers increase the number of people accessing their service by making it easier to get there.

Providers are able to set up a lift-sharing scheme that encourages people to offer and request lifts to their venue. It is hoped that this ‘offline’ scheme will complement the Northumberland Car Share site and ultimately lead to increased use of this currently under-used community resource.

The Move Me team took its liftshare toolkit to community class leaders over the summer and it is currently being trialled with over 2000 people through working with Scremerston First School, Sure Start Berwick Borough (who provide support to parents and children) and Berwick Community Centre (who run adult education classes).


The team also visited Scremerston First School over the summer to work with children on completing the design activity they had started in January when they filled in their travel packs. The results were shared with the children, who were encouraged to design posters illustrating the advantages of sharing lifts, riding their bikes to school and taking the bus.

Below: live|work developed this interactive transport map for the Dott 07 Festival. It is designed to illustrate the potential environmental and financial savings that people could achieve by sharing lifts with other people (IMAGE)

What next?

‘Move Me’ project outcomes include a toolkit for transport providers who wish to improve access to their services. The toolkit includes ‘Lift Exchange’ cards, ‘Activity Templates’ for notice boards, and personalised ‘My Timetable’ forms.

The lessons of Move Me, whch was led by live|work, will also feed into the Rural Access and Mobility Project (RAMP) which fosters sustainable approaches to rural transport in the North East.

For more information email Laura Lomax.

Fact Sources

1. New Mobility Agenda

2. Widex Noise Report: Traffic Noise in England (2007)
Deepak Prasher, Professor of Audiology, The Ear Institute University College London

3. New Mobility Agenda