Students in drive for cleaner air outside schools
Students from the University of Manchester working on a project to clean up air around schools – Josh Partridge, Sam Lee, Andrea Cikes, Yuliya Guban, Nilan Patel and Robert Stredie
A GROUP of students are working on a project to boost air quality for local schoolchildren – by tackling the problem of vehicle-idling.
The group of six final-year management students at the University of Manchester are working with the city’s council to produce a learning pack aimed at primary school-aged pupils, which will support schools’ efforts to reduce levels of harmful idling in surrounding streets.
Idling vehicles burn fuel needlessly, creating pollution hotspots – and this can be a particular issue at school pick-up time.
Children’s developing lungs are particularly sensitive to high levels of pollutants, which can increase the risk of them developing asthma, or other health problems
The packs are being designed to help schools to promote sustainable modes of transport such as walking and cycling for either all or part of the way to school, which helps to ease traffic congestion at peak times.
Joshua Partridge, one of the students taking part, said: “Before taking on this project, I didn’t realise quite how serious the issue of air pollution is and just how harmful it is for people’s health, particularly for young children. As a group, we’re all passionate about sustainability and so doing this project is really exciting. We will all finish our degrees this year, but this is our chance to make a contribution to the city and we hope the project will have lasting benefits, by helping to improve air quality for local children in years to come.”
The group chose to take on a practical project to address a realworld problem as an alternative to producing a dissertation, as part of their final degree submissions.
They will be working with schools in the coming weeks to trial their learning pack, gaining feedback from teachers and pupils before presenting a final version for assessment in May.
Joshua said: “We’ve learned about how to provide information to younger pupils by giving them short, simple tasks with a clear structure, so we hope they will get a lot out of the learning packs. We’ve learned a lot already and it will be great to see how the packs work in practice.”
Manchester council’s executive member for the environment, planning and transport, Coun Angeliki Stiogia, said: “This is a great project which has the potential to boost our ongoing efforts to eliminate needless idling outside schools.”