westlondontravelprogram

West London Travel Program

Area of Concern 

Safety is something that is an increasingly prominent issue in London and has impacted us personally. We want to raise awareness of challenges people are facing and our personal experiences (the following incidents are real examples of things we have experienced and we have reported them as true to the story as possible): 

1. (Date: October 2024) We were cycling down the main road, coming back from rowing, before being circled by two men on lime-bikes with balaclavas, trying to steal our bikes and phones. Unprepared, we were unsure what we should do and what would happen to us so we ran and stopped a trusted adult in the street and waited for help. 

2. (Date: October 2024, 1 week later) I was coming home from school with a friend and waiting at the bus stop. Having just missed the bus, after running to try to catch it, we were tired, alone and unfocused. Suddenly, we heard a loud noise behind us. Before we could move, we were surrounded by young men with fireworks and sparklers, which they proceeded to throw at shop-fronts and onto roads. Scared, we ran into a nearby office and waited until our parents came to pick us up.

We have already begun to share our story, by organising assemblies, telling fellow peers, and spreading valuable information on what to do in these situations. But this is not enough to solve the problem. After sharing our experiences, and listening to our classmates’, it became clear that these were not rare occurrences (definitive survey data below). Many have come forward with similar stories to ours, almost all taking place around the area of Hammersmith and Fulham, where both our incidents happened and where we are planning to help combat the issue. Through discussions, we have seen many people ignore experiences, claiming ‘it’s normal’ and something we ‘have to deal with’ when living in London. However, in our opinion, we should all have the right to feel safe in our own area, and our safety should never be something being ignored. 

Furthermore, through additional research, we found out that 44%(girls) and 24%(boys) of teenagers, in London, according to BBC News, feel regularly unsafe on the streets. Whilst this percentage is not as high as the one we collected, it shows how there are many people in similar positions all over London, not just in local schools and areas. We also discovered there were no charities focussed towards this safety issue, the nearest ones being Streets of Growth, and Brake, which are based on crashes rather than street safety. We want to tackle this issue because it is important for it to be addressed and for measures taken to help prevent further incidents so that students gain confidence when on their own. Through a separate survey we sent out, focussed on the issue of a lack of interactions between schools (in which 145 students responded), only 9% felt that they interacted sufficiently with a mixture of students from different schools. Feeling unable to forge new relationships as they are not provided with the opportunities is the unfortunate reality for many secondary school students in London, but feeling unsafe and at risk when on the streets in London is an even more prominent issue that we felt needs addressing. Both these issues stem from a lack of student confidence, so our aim is to provide secure and fun opportunities for students to develop their confidence, both in going home, and making new friendships, whilst learning about possible risks and preparing them to travel safely and confidently.

Survey 1 – Safety Concerns

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfD2C6ZCqG0YvweRRiz8WelpPmOT18qs97yH7WCMTpnXpvrFA/viewform?usp=sf_link

Survey 2 – Interschool Relationships

https://forms.gle/3NkRruN6EPD798DCA

West London Travel Program

1 Relevance to Area of Concern:

At the start of the project, we identified our area of concern as safety in the streets of London. We aimed to combat this issue by organising workshops and events to raise the confidence of students travelling alone. From the data we collected when researching our area of concern we discovered that 100% of students had previously felt unsafe when travelling to/from school and 82% felt unsafe regularly. As shocking as these results were for us to discover, it was almost more shocking to see the attitude towards safety in our school. Many students believed that feeling unsafe was what we had to ‘deal with’ living in such a busy city and that there was ‘nothing they could do’ to make it better. However, we also saw that many students felt that they did not have sufficient confidence that they believed they needed to travel independently. We also saw this issue of confidence in a separate survey we conducted about inter-school relationships where we saw that 9% of students believed they communicated sufficiently with students from other schools. After discussions with friends and a comment box from the survey, we saw that this too, stemmed from a lack of confidence and self-assurance. From this research, and putting together an overall area of concern, we decided to focus our efforts on ensuring students gained the skills and confidence they need to make responsible, effective decisions that could ultimately save their lives in unsafe situations.

As the project went on, our area of concern became more concise and specific: originally we identified our target target audience as secondary students in London in years 7-11, many who had felt or regularly felt unsafe when travelling in the streets of London, however as the project went on this became specifically year 8s in our school – Godolphin and Latymer. Whilst we still plan to organise workshops for other schools and year groups, we decided that our project would be most valuable for year 8s as for many, this is when they first start travelling independently and can be the most difficult year in terms of finding people to go home with as they may be doing different extracurricular clubs. Additionally, a more concise area of concern helped us focus our efforts on one group in particular and aided us in evaluating our impact.

Furthermore, in the proposal we considered many ideas and the challenges affecting them, ultimately choosing to continue with the travel buddy idea. Whilst we mainly focused on his, we also took inspiration from some of our other rejected ideas, organising workshops and beginning to communicate with other schools in order to expand our outreach.

Whilst our project focussed heavily on our original area of concern, minute changes across the way helped us focus on who in particular we wanted to base our project around and how we would do this – the ideas that we ended up implementing.

2 Organisation:

As a group of five people, we realised that we would be able to make the biggest impact if we split our time between us. Each member of the group took on a certain job in order to form an effective team. We also had help from some volunteers and teachers in order to achieve our goals. Whilst splitting and dividing tasks meant that we could work effectively, we did encounter some problems in our original action plan and worked together to sort them out. 

Outline of our responsibilities and achievements as a team: (For the submission of our project, we also split into 2 teams: the report team + video planning team and the video recording team.)

Sasha: Managing the project in order to ensure everything was up to date and all goals were met or on target to be achieved. Also responsible for writing up our work in the report for submission. Work includes: Schedule and planner (see below) which outlined what we had achieved between updates, what we urgently needed to do and what still had to be done in order to complete the project; presentation for proposal to Year 8s (summary of slides in RAISING AWARENESS paragraph) and visuals/slides for promotional video. (Report)

Luna: Raising awareness for the project and expanding our audience to multiple schools and ages and contributing to the written final report. Work includes: creating and distributing a multitude of surveys to different year groups in a plethora of London schools; coding and releasing a website with our work (www.westlondontravelprogram.com) and the associated email (westlondontravelprogram@gmail.com); writing the Year 8 assembly presentation (also attached) and contacting external speakers to run the presentation. (Report)

Julieta: Planning the Year 8 workshop and contacting stakeholders and visitors for the workshop. Work includes; Communications with SAME academy (particularly the head Walé Yussuf); discussions with stakeholders including pitching our project and budgeting; managing and writing up the section of the report on how and where we got the funding from. (Video)

Daisy: Collecting data and evaluating the success of our project and what we can do to improve and create a bigger impact on the target audience identified in the area of concern. Work includes: Creating a survey for the Year 8 Post-workshop feedback and communicating with the Year 8s through a presentation to raise awareness of our project. (Report)

Anne: Managing social presence and visuals, including creating the logo and branding and managing the project instagram (@westlondontravelprogram). Work includes: Management and updating of the project’s social media (instagram, creation of a TikTok account to raise awareness, etc) and visuals including a logo and establishing theme (colour palate, font and graphics) by which our brand can be identified. (Video)

However, whilst this organisation led us to create a successful workshop and organise our tasks effectively (see organising the workshop) we still faced many issues and challenges, some which we were unable to overcome. 

Our first challenge was contacting other schools about the workshop; we emailed the school office and head of Year 8/Lower school at local schools such as St Paul’s School and Latymer Upper School however never received a response. Whilst it was not an initial success, this was a valuable learning opportunity as we had discussions with teachers who told us that to receive a response we need evidence or proof of success which encouraged us to organise the first of hopefully many workshops to prove that our project was successful and had a genuine impact. Since this first attempt, we have contacted and received responses from a multitude of students from the schools outlined above who would be interested in the travel buddy program and aim to try again with the schools themselves.

Additionally we also struggled with the creation of an app for the travel buddy program, as we had limited experience in creating the code and found it would be expensive to outsource and maintain. We also received feedback from a pitch presentation we gave at the start of the year in which an advisor encouraged us to instead create a website or use existing sites for communication such as messages which is what we decided to do – at this point all members of the travel buddy community receive updates via emails and a WhatsApp group as well as a private, member online website for events. We still hope to create an app one day in the future but want to continue with the program itself before we turn our attention to this.

The third, and most significant challenge was choosing what the content of the workshop would actually be. We have previously led our own safety based presentations, however thought that it would be most valuable for the students in Year 8 to experience a workshop led by a professional in the field – for this workshop, we decided to invite an external speaker to give a talk at our school. When planning the workshop, we hoped to get other schools involved, such as Sacred Heart – a local state school that our school has partnered with in the past; however due to timings, we were unable to find a slot that worked for both schools. However, we still hope to bring out projects to them in the future. 

Planning the Workshop:

To successfully run out this workshop, we made a list of 4 things that we would need to sort out:

What? What would the workshop look like, who would run it/be our speaker 

Where? Where would we run this workshop

When? When will we run the workshop – considering the due date of our report

How? How will we fund the activity

We aim to develop and run our own organised workshops in the future, but to start, we decided to bring in an external speaker with knowledge in the field of safety in order to see how big an impact the workshop may actually make and how many people would be interested in signing up to the program. We discussed with many teachers who they would recommend for this program, and we collected a list of companies who had previously done work at our school, or been recommended by our teachers. The main companies that we were interested in were S.A.M.E Academy, which did workshops on personal safety for Years 7/9. Many of their key teaching points and beliefs aligned with ours, and we felt the workshop would be incredibly beneficial for the younger years at our school. A second company which we considered was Reflect CKD, a self defence company which we previously had experienced a workshop from. We presented these ideas to the school (our stakeholders) and they decided to carry out the self defence workshops anyway and gave us permission to organise the SAME academy workshop ourselves. 

We got in contact with our school to find an external speaker in order to deliver a Workshop to Year 8 pupil. Then, we came across S.A.M.E academy, which had been recommended by many other schools to deliver the assembly. We got in touch with Mr Walé Yusuff, who is the head of S.A.M.E academy, a few days before the workshop and discussed the assembly plan via ZOOM.

This led us to answers for our four established questions:

What?

A workshop, led by SAME academy for Year 8 students at our school.

Where?

We had many discussions with our teachers about where  the workshop would take place and settled on our school hall, the smaller of our two assembly rooms which had the right amount of space to accommodate all the Year 8 students, and a stage for the presenter.

When?

For us, timing was the most difficult aspect of the project. After countless emails to SAME academy, and approximately 5 different proposed dates, we decided on Wednesday 19th March during Period 6 (3.05-4pm)

How?

Due to our school sharing a similar focus on safety, we did not need to use our seed fund in order to fund the project, instead our teachers offered to fund it from the school budget themselves. 

The workshop consisted of 3 sections that took place over different times and days and all helped to convey our message and help us evaluate the impact of the workshop. 

1. Raising awareness through a presentation to Year 8
2. Year 8 assembly on morning of the workshop
3. Workshop with SAME academy

First we went to all the year 8 form rooms in our school, where we talked about the travel buddy program and the upcoming workshop. From this presentation, we received 20 sign ups for the travel buddy program, and many interested in the workshop, which we managed to organise for the entire year group. The day of the workshop, we gave a presentation about our experiences and an overview of what the days later activities would entail.

The workshop itself was a massive success, everyone was involved and active. One stand out activity was when everyone had to count to 1 minute in their head and then sit down, which the entire year group actively participated in. The activity itself was eye opening as it showed just how much we were influenced by our friends – almost everyone sat down at a similar time. 

The travel buddy program:

We have also started work on the program itself, as of the 28th of March, we have over 80 members and sign ups from many different schools (including but not limited to local schools such as ours Godolphin and Latymer and Latymer Upper School). We are currently organising buddy groups for all members and developing our first activity – a meetup event so that everyone feels comfortable with their buddies.

3 Evaluating Impact:

Our project had a major impact on our school – with over 120 taking part in the organised workshop, and 80 going on to join the travel buddy program. Additionally through discussions we learnt that many people had a greater understanding of travel risks and how to deal with them.

We organised a workshop with an external guest, Walé Yussuf from S.A.M.E. academy, which was run for one hour on Wednesday the 19th of March for the Year 8s from our school (Godolphin and Latymer). This allowed us to involve roughly 125 students, who all engaged very well with all of the scenarios and interactive features of the workshop. From our previous surveys, we decided that our project would be most relevant for years 8-11 from other nearby schools as well so although this workshop did not involve the whole of this community, it was a great start to our project. Furthermore, from our previous surveys, we got 40 people to do our ‘Safety in the Streets’ survey and 146 people to do our ‘Interactions with Other Schools’ survey, which are both large examples of community involvement, and all of the year 8s did our survey after the workshop. Moreover, we also gave an assembly to the entirety of the year 8s which proved to be very useful in explaining to them what we were going to have covered in the upcoming safety workshop.

However, to see the real impact and how much the students learnt, we sent out a form asking them how much they knew before and after the workshop in which we saw that it really had made a difference.

Before, on a scale of 1-5 (where 1 was nothing and 5 was lots) 48% of students answered 3 to the question – How much do you know about staying safe. The rest of the results were split between 3s and 4s, however no students answered 5. The same question, but after the workshop had a completely different result. 94% of students answered 4 or 5, with the 6% that answered 3 having answered lower in the previous question. We also received many comments thanking us for the workshop and saying how useful it was for them. The form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejNMIYI2rVbxnUYmI-B9VovOtY1eeMluqikECngJKZNyrCoQ/viewform?usp=header 

4 Timeline of Events:

Effectiveness of Action Plan:

Overall, we managed to achieve the majority of the tasks we had set out in the action plan and even more – with a successful workshop already and many events and charity fundraisers in progress. Whilst for the workshop we used the school budget, we understand that we’ll need to fund by ourselves in the future so have already started planning benefactor dinners and galas. Additionally, we have made lots of progress on the travel buddy program, with over 80 members and the first travel group already created and to be released in the upcoming weeks. However the one thing we did not achieve was the creation of an app, which we decided to not create as we do not have enough experience in the field.

Adaptation of the timeline:

Whilst we achieved all that we had hoped, the order in which we did different activities was different to our original plan. Additionally, we felt that we were short for time when organising the workshop as it happened later than we had previously planned due to many factors we had not considered. Additionally, as mentioned above, we did not have time to create the travel buddy app, and workshops with the buddies are planned for the future, rather than already had happened.

5 Budgeting and Stakeholders

When we first reached out to SAME academy, we had the opportunity to use our seed fund budget to kick-start the project. Initially, we planned to run the workshop for a limited number of girls on a first-come, first-served basis, using a Google Form for sign-ups. Since parents would be responsible for registering their children, we considered charging a small fee of around £10 per student to cover the workshop costs. Additionally, we intended to organize a charity dinner to raise funds for this workshop and future activities we had in mind. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we had to postpone this event.

As we continued planning, we engaged in discussions with teachers and Walé to refine our approach. We realized that limiting the workshop to a select group of students might exclude those who would greatly benefit from the experience. Additionally, logistical challenges arose in managing attendance and ensuring fairness in the sign-up process. Given these considerations, we decided that the best approach would be to offer the workshop to all students in the year group during the school day, making it accessible to everyone and free of charge. The teachers themselves offered to be part of our project and fund the workshop, therefore becoming stakeholders. Overall, they were also pleased with the impact the workshop made and felt as though it was a valuable addition to the school schedule.

To implement this change, we reached out to teachers to discuss how the workshop could be integrated into the school schedule. They were incredibly supportive and recognized the workshop’s relevance and value to the students. As a result, they generously agreed to cover the costs, allowing us to move forward without requiring contributions from parents. This decision not only ensured equal access for all students but also reinforced the importance of the workshop as part of their education.

5 Sustainability

To continue this project we have already begun to organise future events and we have lots of people eager to be a part of the future events and our travel buddy program. We also have some volunteers to help us continue the project on weeks we may not have time. We hope that the project will never ‘finish’ however when we get to a point where we cannot continue it further, we hope that we will have realised awareness for our issues and that our teachings will live on through students sharing what they’ve learnt with each other.

6 Final Reflections

Overall, we were happy and satisfied with the impact our project had made and excited for all that will happen in the future. We hope to continue the travel buddy program for many years to come and continue educating and raising awareness about safety concerns and issues in London.