FEATURE
Bikeability Trust, about their new strategy and how they plan to improve access to bikes for kids alongside continuing their work in schools. Taking over in 2020, Cherry hasn’t had the easiest start to her tenure in charge of the Bikeability Trust, but has been instrumental in transforming different facets of the programme. “We’ve gone through this big period of transformation and made sure that the product we’ve got out there is as robust and as great as it can be for children in this space. “So now it’s time for us to think longer term, what are the big issues that prevent more children and families from being able to take up cycling and active travel as an everyday choice, and transport independence as their first choice? “And that’s where the strategy has kind of come from. We know that what we’re doing is working, but how do we address some of the other wider issues that sit in and around it?”
Some of those issues include things like access to
cycles, but there are also other social factors at play. The cost-of-living crisis for one, with rising costs for parents, but equally, the culture wars we’ve seen in recent years between motorists and cyclists can and does indirectly impact children.
“The culture wars have had quite a significant impact on parents’ views and fears about allowing their children to
go out onto the road. And our new strategy is really about saying we can give children the confidence to cycle. “We’re working at scale to make sure that no child
leaves primary school without one of our training courses to get out there. We know that parents are much more likely to allow their children to cycle once they’ve come through Bikeability, as their confidence improves in their child’s cycling ability in this space.” The Bikeability Trust won a BikeBiz Cycle Advocacy Award in 2024 for their work with the Fleet Cycles project. This project helps to provide bicycles to schools to make sure pupils without access to a cycle can still take part in Bikeability, and it remains an aim of the trust to continue to expand this project, but they also want to do more. “In 2023, we bought just shy of 1,000 cycles for a quite high number of local authorities to use within training. Those 1,000 bikes were used 16,000 times in that year, which shows the scale of the number of children who didn’t
www.bikebiz.com May 2025 | 21
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