Forum topic: Council outlines its plans for 'school streets'

School streets - letter in answer to an enquiry by Palmers Green Community

Dear Basil,

Thanks for your enquiry, Alex has passed it on to me as the lead for the project.

We engaged with all primary school heads on the return from the summer holidays. We opened up expressions of interest to junior and academy schools in the borough, from 9th September to 6th October. This was followed up with weekly reminders to apply throughout the open period.

Oakthorpe and St Monica’s will be going live in the new year. A final date has not been fixed as of yet. We need to finalised the vehicle exemption application process and write to residents in the affected area to inform them of the application process. This is likely to take place in Mid Jan so I would hope to implement the scheme after the Feb half term.

These two school schools were part of our initial trial to bench test the process for implementation. We have used a robust engagement plan delivered by our partners Sustrans, which involved letters to all residents, multiple open evenings where we discussed the scheme. and pop up events at pick up and drop off time to talk to parents. Some elements like permitting which have caused delays at these schools will not affect future schemes and we will take a full review of the process at the end of the implementation to ensure our lesson learnt help to refine our delivery.

Oakthorpe and St Monica’s will be the first two completed school streets in the borough. We are working with the education dept to implement school streets and schools that have recently expanded and may have a school street and part of their planning conditions. We also expect to start the engagement process with a school that will be selected from the September expression of interest.

We hope to have five school streets implemented by the spring 2020. We will have a solid commitment for the next year's delivery once 2020 / 21 budgets are released in April 2020. Once funding is established we will be able to take the decision as to whether to re release expressions of interest for a second intake. If this is done I would expect this to happen in June 2020.

We received 13 applications for school streets in September. All applications that are considered viable for delivery will be held on file pending the necessary funding to implement. Engineers' assessments have just been concluded and all schools will be notified in the new year.

Where a school may not be feasible to implement a school street, we will seek to work with those schools to introduce other measures that may contribute to a migration away from vehicle uses at pick up and drop off times to further tackle safety at the school gate, obesity in children through inactivity and the climate emergency that we are facing as a community.

I hope this helps to give you a full picture of our program, feel free to drop me a line directly should you need any further information.

Kind regards,

Craig Nicol | Healthy Streets & Complementary Measures Manager
Planning, Highways and Transportation | Place Department | London Borough of Enfield