Examining the reach and effectiveness of cycle training in schools using the Millennium Cohort Study

Promoting cycling, including promoting cycling among children, would be expected to deliver substantial benefits in terms of population health and environmental sustainability. Many children do not meet government recommendations in terms of the amount of exercise they do, and increasing levels of cycling would be one way in which they could incorporate additional physical activity into their everyday lives. In addition, many children are currently driven relatively short distances by their parents to be dropped off at school or other destinations. If more children instead made these trips by bicycle then this would also be expected to reduce the congestion, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions associated with motorised transport.

Since 2007, one of the Department for Transport's flagship policies to promote cycling is the delivery of 'Bikeability' cycle proficiency training in schools. Currently, around half of children in England are offered the training for free before they leave primary school, and the annual cost of the programme to the Department for Transport is £11 million. However there exists very little robust evidence regarding which particular children get the cycle training, or regarding the effect the scheme has on subsequent cycling behaviour.

In collaboration with the Department for Transport, this proposal will seek to fill these gaps in the evidence using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). MCS is a nationally-representative birth cohort which has now been surveyed five times, most recently in 2012 at age 10/11. In this most recent sweep, 8,700 parents in England were asked if their children had "ever done any formal cycling proficiency training such as 'Bikeability'". Parents were also asked how often their children used their bicycles. Using these data, we will seek to answer two broad research questions. First we will examine which individual, family and area characteristics help explain why some children do cycle training and some do not; for example, are boys more likely than girls to get the training, or are children from richer areas more likely to get the training than those from poorer areas? Second, we will examine whether children do in fact cycle more often if they have been offered cycle training in school. Answering this second question will involve comparing children whose schools had already offered cycle training at the time of the MCS survey with children whose schools offered cycle training later in the same year. If cycle training is effective, our prediction is that the first set of children would report cycling more often than the second set of children. As a part of this second research question, we will examine whether there is any evidence that cycle training works better for some sorts of children than for others - for example, whether it has a bigger effect on boys than on girls.

Together, answering these two questions will provide the most robust evidence to date regarding the effectiveness of cycle training in schools, and regarding whether all children benefit equally. Our non-academic partners, the Department for Transport, will then be able to use this evidence as part of deciding how best to pursue their goal of increasing cycling in childhood in an effective, cost-effective and equitable manner. Our findings will also have broader relevance for the international evidence base, helping to address the current lack of robust studies examining the effectiveness and equity of different types of policies to promote cycling.

In the short- to medium-term, the most direct beneficiary of this research will be the Department for Transport (DfT). This Department is our non-academic partner and is also the key policy audience for the research, insofar as it funds and manages the Bikeability scheme, and will be reviewing its plans for the future of this scheme as part of the 2015 spending review. Our research will provide the Department with the most robust evidence available to date regarding which children get Bikeability training and regarding the short-term effect of that training on cycling behaviour. Quantifying this will be of use to them in conducting their own planned economic evaluation, while any evidence regarding differential uptake or effectiveness may provide a useful first step to improving the reach and equity of the programme. The DfT will host the PI as a visiting researcher on secondment during prolonged periods of this grant; this will help create an effective and fruitful collaboration, and will ensure that we can provide the Department for Transport with the most relevant information possible in order to aid its decision-making with regard to the future implementation of Bikeability.

In the medium- to long term, it is hoped that informing the evidence base underlying the Bikeability scheme will benefit the children who in the future will be the recipients of government and non-government spending on cycling, both in the UK and internationally. For parents and schools, our findings may be of interest in informing their own choices about whether to seek cycle training for their children or to offer it in their schools. For those delivering the cycle training, evidence on differential uptake of the scheme should prompt the examination of new ways to make access more equitable. Similarly for those commissioning cycle training, evidence on the effectiveness - or non-effectiveness - of this and other alternative schemes can ultimately inform decision-making as to how best to invest in promoting cycling among children. Successfully achieving an increase in cycling during childhood would, in turn, be expected to yield important public health and environmental sustainability benefits, as well as increasing children's independent mobility and enhancing the quality of life in local neighbourhoods.

Finally, in the nearer future, it is expected that a number of primary and secondary school students from disadvantaged schools in London will benefit from the engagement work planned in the course of the proposal. Specifically, it is proposed that around 20 to 25 secondary school children will gain high-quality scientific work experience in the context of working for two weeks on research projects inspired by the current proposal. In addition to this, a larger number of primary school children will benefit from briefer engagement activities such as workshops in schools.