This exciting project offers parents alongside their children the opportunity to learn and improve their cycling skills in sessions lead by Bikability trained instructors. This will culminate in lead family rides in and around the local area and further afield as abilities improve. A previous project, delivered from 2015 to 2018, worked with 180 children, all of whom grew in their cycling skills and confidence. The project was successful but many of the children were in households where a parent could not or would not (due to lack of confidence) cycle, which meant that the opportunity to practice skills once the project was finished were limited.Have a read of this press release: https://tfl-newsroom.prgloo.com/news/tfl-press

 

Cycling is a low-cost and healthily advantageous activity that can make a real difference in family lives. We want to deliver a programme that will maximise the experiences of families and children that we work with and support cohesive family relationships.

The project will take on current parents and children from the Little Manor Play Project. Sessions will target non-cyclists and novice cyclists (and parents will be grouped by ability based on a pre-project assessment). 

The training will be delivered by two Bikeability trained staff and supported by volunteers.

Each course of training that takes place will include simple bike maintenance workshops, advice on bike storage (vital for those who live in high-rise / overcrowded housing) and advice on purchasing affordable bikes through the 2nd hand market or Cycling for All scheme. As the project develops, we will up-skill our volunteers to enable the project to run with a single Cycle Instructor together with 3 volunteers. We will also recruit a reporting volunteer to help gather stories from participants for monitoring purposes, our website and social media.

The project will work with 6-8 parents and 5 children over each half term. This will happen one night a week, 5-7 pm for 4 weeks. Sessions will take place in a large hall within our trusted community centre and then move onto roads in the surrounding area as skills and confidences improve. At the end of each term a staff-led ‘adventure’ ride will be planned together with staff and participants of the two previous courses. The adventure will cover on and off-road cycling and celebrate the end of the learning sessions, and the improvement in skills which will have occurred. Each adventure will be appropriate to the ability level of the group.

Thank you to our funders; we couldn’t have achieved, and continue to achieve our aims without your support.

Groundwork-logo