Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

Promoting cycling, including promoting cycling among children, would be expected to deliver substantial benefits in terms of population health and environmental sustainability. Many children do not meet government recommendations in terms of the amount of exercise they do, and increasing levels of cycling would be one way in which they could incorporate additional physical activity into their everyday lives. In addition, many children are currently driven relatively short distances by their parents to be dropped off at school or other destinations. If more children instead made these trips by bicycle then this would also be expected to reduce the congestion, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions associated with motorised transport. Since 2007, one of the Department for Transport's flagship policies to promote cycling is the delivery of 'Bikeability' cycle proficiency training in schools. Currently, around half of children in England are offered the training for free before they leave primary school, and the annual cost of the programme to the Department for Transport is £11 million. However there exists very little robust evidence regarding which particular children get the cycle training, or regarding the effect the scheme has on subsequent cycling behaviour. In collaboration with the Department for Transport, this proposal will seek to fill these gaps in the evidence using data from the 5th Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). MCS is a nationally-representative birth cohort which has now been surveyed five times, most recently in 2012 at age 10/11. In this most recent sweep, 8,700 parents in England were asked if their children had "ever done any formal cycling proficiency training such as Bikeability". Parents were also asked how often their children used their bicycles. Using these data, we will seek to answer two broad research questions. First we will examine which individual, family and area characteristics help explain why some children do cycle raining and some do not; for example, are boys more likely than girls to get the training, or are children from richer areas more likely to get the training than those from poorer areas? Second, we will examine whether children do in fact cycle more often if they have been offered cycle training in school. Answering this second question will involve comparing children whose schools had already offered cycle training at the time of the MCS survey with children whose schools offered cycle training later in the same year. If cycle training is effective, our prediction is that the first set of children would report cycling more often than the second set of children. As a part of this second research question, we will examine whether there is any evidence that cycle training works better for some sorts of children than for others - for example, whether it has a bigger effect on boys than on girls. Together, answering these two questions will provide the most robust evidence to date regarding the effectiveness of cycle training in schools, and regarding whether all children benefit equally. Our non-academic partners, the Department for Transport, will then be able to use this evidence as part of deciding how best to pursue their goal of increasing cycling in childhood in an effective, cost-effective and equitable manner. Our findings will also have broader relevance for the international evidence base, helping to address the current lack of robust studies examining the effectiveness and equity of different types of policies to promote cycling.

Multi-stage stratified random sample

Self-completion