This guide is for schools looking to get accredited on Modeshift STARS to Good (Bronze) level for the first time. The below timeline outlines the steps needed to accredit your school travel plan to Good within a school term.
Modeshift has multiple levels of awards from Approved (Green) as the most basic, to Good, Very Good (Silver), Excellent (Gold) and then the highest recognition which is Outstanding (Platinum). In your first year, the highest accreditation you can submit for is Good, as the levels above require 1 to 3 years of plans (so you can show how the work you have done has effected travel in the school).
Page contents
- Step one: Login to Modeshift STARS
- Step two: Complete background information
- Step three: Run your hands-up survey with pupils and staff
- Step four: Complete your transport issues
- Step five: Set two targets
- Step six: Detail your current initiatives
- Step seven: Finish and email the Safer Travel Team to say you've completed your school travel plan
Step one: Login to Modeshift STARS
This is to be ideally completed across week one.
Contact the Safer Travel team at schooltravelplans@surreycc.gov.uk and ask to be registered as a user for your school's plan. There is no limit to the number of users who can be registered.
Once this has been done you should receive an email from Modeshift asking you to set up a password and then you should be able to access the site. Now you can Login to Modeshift STARS. If at any time you cannot remember your password, just click 'forgotten password' in the bottom right corner of the login screen.
As it probably is your first time using Modeshift, you may find it a bit confusing. Sometimes it is not immediately the most intuitive website to navigate. The Safer Travel Team runs regular training webinars on how to use it. Contact us at schooltravelplans@surreycc.gov.uk and we can invite you to a training session.
When you login you will be taken to a home page. Click on your schools name and you will be taken to your Travel Plan. The first page you see is the Site tab. Most of the information here will already be prepopulated. You should also see Introduction, Accreditation Progress, Aims and Objectives, Working Group, Site Audit, and Users for site.
Top tip: You may find that some of above-mentioned tabs are not here when you first log in. If so, there is a quite simple remedy. Select the pencil icon in the top right corner and then edit one of the sections. For instance, one of the first you might edit could be, Travel Plan Coordinator in the Site tab. Write the name of whoever oversees the plan in the school and then scroll down and hit the Save button. Once this is complete, the additional tabs will appear.
Step two: Complete background information
To be completed across week two.
You will now look to populate the Introduction, Site Audit and Aims and Objectives tabs making sure all fields are completed. Introduction will be where you will complete a lot of the background information about your school, such as number of staff and pupils and the school opening and closing times.
Site Audit will be where you will detail the different ways your school is accessed by staff and pupils, and detail about the road infrastructure nearby such as zebra crossings, as well as the parking facilities available. Be sure to complete every editable box and if there is a box asking for something your school doesn't have, simply put a zero rather than leaving the section blank to show you have looked at it. This may seem like a lot of work but once complete it is likely to only change very little over future years and will only need simple edits after this. Your travel plan is a public facing document, and the more detail you input into this section, the easier it will be for the public to understand how children can travel to your school.
The next section to complete is Aims and Objectives. Your aim is what your ambition will be for creating the travel plan at your school, and the objectives should be structured using the SMART framework. We have an FAQ page, which advises how to complete all the tabs in your plan.
Top tip: Make sure you input or update where your pupils and staff are travelling in from. This can be included in the Intro to your site field or in the Transportation links field.
Step three: Run your hands-up survey with pupils and staff
To distribute the survey across weeks three and four.
Primary schools need an 80% response rate from pupils and 50% from staff to meet threshold. Secondary schools need a 70% response rate from pupils and 50% from staff to meet threshold.
After all pupils and staff have completed the survey using the survey link that you will send out across the school, make sure that the student travel modal shift and staff travel modal shift tabs are showing and show your survey data.
Top tip: To send out your survey, just copy and paste the link under survey link in the site tab and send it to the classroom teachers. They don’t need a Modeshift login to access this. As them to input all fields such as name of class, year group and no. of students absent and then they can ask the two survey questions and collect the data by getting the students to put their hands up. Finally they can click save at the end. For staff, you'll be requesting them to select staff individual and then completing and clicking save.Initiatives and Consultations last for 3 years, and so if you wish you can look back over the last two and a half years to add different initiatives if necessary to make the numbers
Step four: Complete your transport issues
To be completed across weeks three and four.
Your transport issues are those which affect any travel to your school and what you are ultimately hoping to solve. You should try and identify the issue itself rather than what the solution might be. For instance, you might wish to include an issue noting the lack of safe crossing points on the road outside the school. This though is more of a solution to problem, rather than the issue which might be written as, the volume of traffic making it difficult for pupils and parents to cross the road. Another common one in Surrey is parents parking poorly such an in residents driveways, on double yellows or on the pavement.
Modeshift needs a minimum of one issue, though often most schools have many more. Your plan should represent a cohesive web, with your issues relating to your aims and objectives, and your targets and initiatives (detailed later) should link to the issues that they are trying to solve. For your first plan we recommend setting 1-3 of the most important issues, adding more, if necessary, in future years.
Step five: Set two targets
To be completed across week five.
You will need to set a minimum of two targets, targeted for the next school year. These can be a mix of:
- a modal shift target, (modal shift being a change in how pupils or staff travel to school) relevant to your pupil / staff survey such as looking for an increase in those walking/cycling to school
- a qualitative target, for example, 'reducing the number of resident complaints about poor parent parking by x% over the next 12 months'.
You will need at least one modal shift target for the next year. These targets should also relate to your issues, and you must have initiatives which support meeting these targets. When you go to set a modal target, Modeshift will automatically populate it with information from this years survey so you can see what you have already achieved.
Step six: Detail your current initiatives
To be started in week six and completed in week eight, after the half-term break.
For Bronze accreditation you need at least 10 completed travel initiatives, five completed supporting travel initiatives and at least two completed consultation initiatives.
Top tip: Initiatives and Consultations last for 3 years, and so if you wish you can look back over the last two and a half years to add different initiatives if necessary to make the numbers.
We also have handy Modeshift STARS Education Initiatives, and Consultations Guides which we can send to you to help you with these sections or are available on our School Travel Plan Resources page.
Step seven: Finish and email the Safer Travel Team to say you've completed your school travel plan
To be completed across week nine.
Once you've completed the above tasks, then please email schooltravelplans@surreycc.gov.uk to let us know that your plan is complete. We will then moderate the plan with the Senior Travel Plan Officer and provide feedback or sign off.
Do not click the submit button in the Accreditation Progress tab until we have checked over it.