⁎A28 Impact of ‘Bikeability’, a national cycle training scheme for children in England

Abstract

Abstract Background The centrally-funded cycle training scheme ‘Bikeability’ is a flagship policy of the current government in England. ‘Bikeability’ is targeted at 9-11 year olds and its stated aims include giving children the confidence to cycle more. There is, however, little evidence on the scheme’s effectiveness in achieving this. We therefore examined whether delivering Bikeability is associated with 1) cycling frequency, or 2) independent cycling Methods We used operational delivery data to identify all schools in England (outside London) that offered Bikeability in 2011-2012. We merged this with information on children (aged 10-11) participating in the nationally-representative Millennium Cohort Study. We used a natural experimental design to capitalise on the fact that Millennium Cohort participants were surveyed at different times during 2012 and were also offered Bikeability at different times during 2012. This allowed us to compare cycling levels between children whose schools delivered Bikeability before their survey interview (‘intervention group’, N=2563) with an otherwise comparable group of children whose schools delivered Bikeability later in the academic year (‘control group’, N=773). Parents reported whether their child had completed any cycle training; their child’s cycling frequency; whether their child ever made local cycling trips without an adult; and other child and family factors. Results Children whose school had offered Bikeability were much more likely to have completed cycle training than the control group (68% vs. 28%, p Conclusions Offering high-quality cycle training free at the point of delivery in English schools encourages children to do cycle training, but we found no evidence of short-term effects on cycling frequency or independent cycling. Future evaluation should investigate longer-term effects on these and other stated Bikeability objectives such as increasing cycling safety.