What do our Active Travel Schools Team do in the School Holidays?
During the school holidays, work in our ten FEL Active Travel hub schools doesn’t stop just because classes do.
Schools act as anchors within their communities, and many of the schools we work with run holiday camps for pupils, particularly at primary school levels. These camps provide a valuable opportunity to extend the reach of our Active Travel project, strengthen relationships with partners, and engage pupils who will transition into secondary school in the coming years. As with term-time delivery, our sessions are adapted to suit the needs of each school and make best use of available grounds and facilities, meaning that the work our Active Travel officers do in each of our hubs can be quite different.
With classes now back in action and the Easter holidays coming to an end, we’re taking a moment to look back at what we’ve achieved across some of our schools over these last two weeks, as well as how far our school holiday camp work has come over the years!
Larbert
Our Active Travel Officer Callum runs the sessions at our Larbert High School hub, and he has delivered a wide range of activities across the school’s summer, Easter, and winter holiday camps. These camps are delivered at the high school in partnership with Tryst Community Sports Club. The camps have helped create a welcoming and supportive environment for pupils from Primary 1 through to Primary 7 in Larbert feeder schools, enabling them to take part together in a broad range of sports and new activities.
The school camps are a huge amount of fun and show a strong demand for Active Travel activities in the area, with 40 pupils bringing their own bikes and scooters to Callum’s sessions in the most recent Easter camp!
With the younger Larbert pupils, some of Callum’s sessions include cycling, scootering, and geocaching, often combined through Active Travel treasure hunts. For older and more confident participants, Callum delivers pump track sessions, making full use of the track facility located close to Larbert High School, which allows young people with an interest in cycling to further develop their technical skills.
A particularly positive outcome from Callum’s work at Larbert has been the number of pupils who have returned to support future camps in a volunteering capacity, helping to assist sessions and ensure participants are safe and supported. In the recent Easter holidays, five older pupils came back to help Callum with the younger groups. This progression highlights the impact of the programme and shows how these sessions are engaging students in sustainable and active travel in the long-term.
Alloa
As part of the Easter camp programme at Alloa Academy, our Active Travel Officer Craig worked with Active Clacks to deliver cycle skills sessions. Over four days, groups of up to eight young people from surrounding primary schools developed their cycling skills through games, challenges, and races, such as ‘King of the Ring’ and activities where pupils had to build their own challenging race courses. As well as being fun and enjoyable, these sessions ultimately help pupils to develop their confidence and competency when riding bikes.
This partnership with Active Clacks has continued to strengthen over the years and is now a well-established collaboration. When the summer holidays approach, Craig will continue to support the summer camp programme, delivering further cycling and outdoor activity sessions.
Falkirk
In Falkirk, we supported the Safer Communities Youth Action Project during their Easter programme. This project works with young people across Tamfourhill, Camelon and Bantaskin to encourage youth-led action. One of the activities we helped with was a ‘Dr Bike’ session, giving young people the opportunity to bring their own bikes from home to be checked and repaired.
Not only did this event help increase safe active travel in the area, it also allowed some young participants to begin developing their bike maintenance skills as our skilled mechanics talked them through the work being carried out.
Stirling
In Stirling, we have regularly partnered with Cycling Killearn across the school holidays to deliver community-led rides and activities. These rides are led by our Senior Active Travel Officer Scott who has a great amount of knowledge about routes in the area through his work at Balfron High School.
Collaborating with Cycling Killearn has led to the creation of ‘Killearn by Bike’ – a fun day of led rides for children of all ages – with Scott leading the rides on the day with the goal of showing how easy it is to cycle around Killearn. These sessions are always well received by participants while also providing valuable experience for volunteers from Cycling Killearn. Over the years, our partnership with Cycling Killearn has helped strengthen community connections in Stirling and provide safe cycling opportunities across the region.
Linlithgow
Linlithgow is one of our newest Active Travel school hubs, which we developed at the start of the 2025/2026 school year.
Our Active Travel Officer Joe works on this project, which we run in partnership with Linlithgow Community Development Trust (LCDT). During the recent Easter holidays, Joe and members of the LCDT took groups of primary and secondary school pupils from Bridgend on led mountain bike rides at Beecraigs Country Park. Alongside these mountain bike sessions, Joe also helped deliver a series of fun activities at the West Lothian Cycle Circuit, helping to build cycling skills and confidence among young people. Some of these activities included time trials and ‘Stop in the Box’ challenges, which the students loved, showing real enthusiasm for getting involved in sustainable travel.
As a new Active Travel school hub for us, we’re looking forward to running these sessions in the summer holidays at Linlithgow for the first time later this year.
Overall: Our School Holiday Camps
While the majority of our work happens during the school year (with our Active Travel Officers delivering sessions across our ten Active Travel school hubs multiple days each week), our work promoting sustainable and active travel doesn’t finish when term does!
The holiday camps that we support provide valuable opportunities for pupils to keep participating in active travel over the holidays, and not let the confidence, skills or enthusiasm they develop during our school sessions fade away.
As well as helping pupils, these camps also support the ongoing development of our Active Travel team, as multiple staff members often come together to deliver larger sessions, which allows opportunities for staff to learn from each other and share ideas. Having the chance to observe different coaching styles, best practice, and approaches to group engagement strengthens our delivery and contributes to the continuous improvement of our sessions.
We’re really grateful to our school hubs and our partners for helping us deliver these sessions, and keep more children engaged in cycling, bike maintenance skills and active travel across the Forth Valley during the holidays.
