The Green-Schools Travel Programme is calling on people to ditch the car this week and walk to school.

The theme for National Walk to School week is Connections.

Green Schools travel officer Aengus Kennedy joined Newstalk Breakfast to give more detail.

“The idea is to try and connect to the people that are around us, that we share our journeys in with, or connect to our local place, or connect to the nature that’s around us,” he said.

“So, every year, Green School run a big event at the beginning of the school year, a big call to action, Walk to School Week.

“We ask all of those participating in Green Schools – which is most of the schools in the country - to try and encourage students, where safe, where possible, to walk at least some of their journey.

“This year, we’re asking them to focus on their journey on what’s around them on the way.”

British school children on street messing about walking home from school the high school of Glasgow. Image: gerard ferry / Alamy. 18 April 2017

Mr Kennedy said “it’s very plain to see” that the number of children who walk or cycle to school have “dropped off” over the years.

“Anecdotally, for somebody of my kind of age or generation, everybody walked or cycled to school only a few short decades ago, and those numbers have really dropped off,” he said.

“But our participating schools do surveys of their own schools, of their own participants, to see what kind of numbers are walking to school and how that’s going.

“The numbers have really dropped off over the years, over the last couple of decades, as we’ve got more and more used to our cars and we started to rush more and more.

“What we do see when the programme is enacted, and when people go through the various steps of the green flag, they’re able to encourage people [to] start walking to school, and it has a snowball effect.”

Climate change

According to Mr Kennedy, children walking to schools rather than being driven “has a huge impact” on climate change.

“It’s great for our minds and our body- and as we all know students and all of us need to be out and about more - but it’s also cleaning the air,” he said.

“One of the places where the air can be at its very dirtiest is on those cold winter days when if traffic is building up outside of school and cars are sitting there waiting for or dropping off students.

“You can get a bottleneck of traffic there and that can lead to a bottleneck of dirty air.

“Of course, all of that is emitting carbon and other greenhouse gases.”

Mr Kennedy said that for every 100 metres a student walks to school rather than being driven, they save a balloon’s worth of carbon dioxide from being released into the air.

Main image: Walk to school with Granddad. Image: David James. 27 June 2017