In the Frame | September 24
Community News
School Bikeability Training in Hackney & Waltham Forest
There are a couple of big developments in North East London for Bikeability schools courses. Hackney council have adopted a different approach to organising Level 1 & 2 courses through Cycle Confident by allowing schools to opt-out to cycle training. The aim is to provide the opportunity for all children aged between 9-11 to take part in Bikeability as consent will be given by the school as opposed to the parents/guardians which means no more consent forms to sign. Parents will then receive details about the training and the requirements and then choose for their child not to take part. This appears to be a good move from Hackney council and a welcome boost in terms of employment opportunities for instructors in the area. However, in my experience, training works best when you have buy-in from multiple parties including the riders and their parents. It remains to be seen whether everyone is going to be prepared before each course. In addition to this booking policy, numbers are reduced to 18 to accommodate beginners and allow more time in the school day to allow their participation. However, you could argue, it wouldn’t be required if Hackney offered “learn to ride”/ “Balance Bike” courses in schools or individual cycle skills training instead. Overall, this change is going to allow more children to take part in Bikeability and there’s more work for instructors so win-win.
Moving on to Waltham Forest, where Bikeability has resumed after a hiatus caused by the contract tendering process. As a result, the number of courses being delivered this term is significantly less than previous years. This is partly due to schools not being offered to book courses until June when the funding decision was announced but a significant reason is that Cycle Confident is no longer a “Tier 1” supplier of school training in WF as Cycling Instructor were awarded that contract. The reason for this change of provider doesn’t seem to have been made clear to either company but instructors have been kept even further in the dark by not even publicly announcing this change! I think that the residents of WF have a right to know which provider is responsible for providing Bikeability within schools but as far as I’m aware this has not been widely publicised by anyone (including CI!).
Frame Training & Community
In other news, Frame is pleased to announce the first of its pre-qualification training courses! This course will be found soon on the “Training” section of our website- fr-me.io or the education platform Udemy. It’s called “Becoming a Cycling Instructor” and its purpose is to inform people either considering employment in the cycle training industry or those who have signed up for a qualification already. The online video course will include topics covering information about what you need to know to prepare yourself, the industry and what the qualifications cover.
Any feedback from current instructors of any experience level is welcome to help improve this course and the best place to share your thoughts is using the updated “Community” section on our website! There you will find a forum for asking and answering questions, training resources and cycling-related discussion. Anyone can view the posts but you’ll need to sign-up to contribute. You’ll also find the Community Tools- an Instructor Directory plus the Risk Assessment & Incident Report databases. This will provide invaluable information for instructors who are either new to a particular area or the industry itself. In the future, it’s my aim that the RA database will replace the need to provide single-use, site-specific RA’s by allowing instructors to add or modify details after each course instead of starting each RA from scratch. The purpose of the Incident Report database will be to gather data and identify trends to improve training methods by sharing this information with the Community. Incident reports will no longer be siloed by individual providers who might be scared that this information will be used against them but used by instructors everywhere to empower themselves and their riders by ensuring incidents are prevented and not repeated.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts about anything mentioned in this newsletter or feel free to let me know if there’s anything you think you should be included! Any suggestions you have to improve either the website or newsletter are welcome.
Miles