Winner of the Instructor of the Year award, Lindsay Cameron is a class teacher at Kintore Primary School in Aberdeenshire. As delivery lead for Bikeability Scotland at Kintore, Lindsay has, over the last three years, transformed delivery with her focus on creating a comprehensive and sustainable programme at the school.
She has brought together a team of trained instructors and volunteers who together make sure all pupils leave for secondary school with Bikeability Levels 1 and 2 and the confidence and knowledge to take their cycling adventures further.
We met up with Lindsay on a rainy Aberdeenshire morning to find out more about her approach to the training and the impact of Bikeability at Kintore.
What was your reaction to winning the award?
I was surprised because I didn't know that I'd been nominated. I had no idea. I received an email and I kind of misread it, thinking I had just been nominated, and then I reread it and thought, I've actually won. It was a complete and utter surprise.
How did you get involved with Bikeability Scotland?
I am a full-time class teacher and we run Bikeability at the school. We started off with just P7s, and then we we’re moving into the younger, from P5 upwards.
I did my training about five years ago along with some other members of staff and some parent helpers. I'm not a P7 teacher but I was helping run the Bikeability courses for the P7s and luckily my head teacher gave me a time out of class in order to do that. We would take three days for Level 1 and 2.
Over the last two years, I've been the Bikeability coordinator for the school I coordinate the training and the parent helpers and the timings of things and the materials and the other bits and pieces that need to go along with that.
Tell us a little bit about Kintore Primary.
We are a semi-rural school. We're quite large, almost 400 children. The cohorts that we teach are quite large. The last one we did were the P6s and there were about 60 children that we put through Level 1 and 2.
The school itself is in a village. It's got a busy main road coming through it with a lot of heavy farm traffic and trucks and things like that. It is a busy road and a lot of the children live in the village and do cycle to school. We do our training in a quieter residential area, but there are a lot of children that [were] cycling to school without having done any Bikeability training. That was one of the main reasons that we decided that it would be a good thing to keep the keep the kids safe as they are coming to school.
We say to the children, the main skill in Bikeability is listening because they have to follow instructions on the road. There is also an element of controlling their [own] behaviour and being responsible.
Do you have local roads that are good for training?
Having said there's a busy road coming through the village, we don't do the training on the busy road. We go to a residential area that’s a series of sort of cul-de-sacs. It has a few junctions, so it allows us to cover all the instruction that's required for Level 2, but it can be quite quiet.
When traffic sees a bunch of children in high-viz vests they often avoid us. What we want is for the children to be around traffic so that they know what to do and they don't freeze, because that's what a lot of children do.
We're trying to give them the confidence to be part of the traffic. If you're doing circuits around junctions the children can get overconfident because there's nothing there and they forget to look. You really do want more hazards for them to react to. That can be challenging.
How do you overcome this?
We've had some members of staff and instructors pretending to be traffic. They're on a bike pretending to be a car. We also get the children to create traffic. We have children coming around doing U-turns when the other children coming up to a junction so that they've got something to react to.
How do the kids feel about going on the road?
They're pretty excited to go out on the road because by the time they get to Level 2, they've done one or two days at Level 1 in the playground. That quickly gets boring for them and they're desperate to get out on the road.
What is it like being an instructor?
I think there's two types of children. There are the ones who are nervous, and we obviously don't take children out for Level 2 unless we're confident that they're going to be safe on the road. They've maybe not had experience of being in traffic before and they don't know what to do. Seeing that confidence build is really nice and as the training goes on you give them less and less instruction. When they do it on their own and it becomes automatic. That's rewarding.
We've taught at P7 and a lot of them are quite confident on bikes. There can be overconfidence as well. And they're like, ‘can we do wheelies?’ and ‘we want to do all these exciting things!’ – I always say to them, that's great but not on the road. There's a place for that and we have some amazing trails around Aberdeenshire, and it's one of the reasons I got into Bikeability to try and encourage children not only to go on the roads, but to go on these amazing trails in the forests.
There can be a bit of overconfidence when they get on the roads and we have to calm that down but they soon realise the seriousness of it - while still making it fun. It's rewarding to see those children settle down and know that they're going to be safe coming to school in the morning.
Wellbeing is one of our school values and Bikeability is a part of that. Yes, it's teaching the kids to be safe coming to school, and we have a responsibility as a school to make sure that the children are coming to school safely, but it's also promoting that wider aspect of wellbeing for them.
What do you need to get Bikeability up and running in a school like Kintore?
You have to have a supportive headteacher or a supportive management team because it's them that's ultimately allowing this to happen. We are very lucky that we do. Our headteacher has put teachers and also parent volunteers through the training. We now have a bank of parent helpers. It started off with parents of the children that were doing the training. But then if you're doing that in P7, those children move on. We're very lucky that we have a supportive parent group that has come back and given up their time.
We have people that volunteer year-on-year to do that. Without them we couldn't run the sessions.
Is it important to get the children out from behind their desks?
I'm all for active learning. I love taking the kids out and just promoting that lifestyle, I think nowadays it's just even more important that we are promoting the health and wellbeing of children who are not going outside as much as they could do.
Wellbeing is one of our school values and Bikeability is a part of that. Yes, it's teaching the kids to be safe coming to school, and we have a responsibility as a school to make sure that the children are coming to school safely, but it's also promoting that wider aspect of wellbeing for them.
What would you say to a school who currently isn’t providing Bikeability training?
They are learning a lot of skills other than cycling. We say to the children, the main skill in Bikeability is listening because they have to follow instructions on the road. There is also an element of controlling their [own] behaviour and being responsible.
If you do both levels, it's the best part of a week. And if that's all it takes to make children safer on the roads, then to me it's a no brainer.
Do you have any final thoughts and reflections?
It is really thanks to the management team pushing for this to happen because it is taking children out of school. I think it is an important thing for the school to be doing especially when you've got a lot of children coming to school on a bike.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. A longer audio version is available.