Stephen Perse Cambridge has partnered with innovative shared transport provider Kura to provide safer, greener, smarter school travel for its students in Cambridge.
After a successful trial this year, this exciting collaboration will offer the school community a fully managed school transport service to ultimately reduce the number of cars travelling to and from the school in the city centre, by providing reliable, safe, and easily accessible bus travel for students.
Leveraging its expertise in home to school transport, Kura has meticulously mapped and recorded the most and least frequently taken routes by Stephen Perse students in Cambridge. Based on this data, Kura has devised an improved route system that focuses on servicing the most heavily congested areas, ensuring efficiency and reliability for students and parents alike.
The partnership delivers a safe and reliable transport option for parents, which they can manage through a booking service mobile app or web portal, enabling them to review, change and cancel journeys with flexibility and convenience. Additionally, real-time vehicle tracking and messaging features on the app keep parents, students, and school authorities well-informed in the event of unexpected traffic delays.
Chris Woodey, Head of Sustainability at Stephen Perse Cambridge said: “Through our partnership with Kura our community has an exciting opportunity to reduce congestion in our beloved city, while improving air quality and benefitting from the peace of mind that trackable travel provides helping parents to manage their own travel arrangements and improving the school’s safeguarding provision.
This initiative marks the first in a planned series of sustainability improvements for our schools, as we start to look into how to help our families make fewer environmentally impactful school journeys. Our long term goal is to review the operations of our entire footprint and implement micro and macro improvements to our sustainability practices. We are grateful to our community of parents and students and the wider city of Cambridge for supporting us in this shared journey.”
Godfrey Ryan, CEO at Kura, said: “Kura is delighted to form a school transport partnership with Stephen Perse Cambridge. By optimising the bus route network, we will help reduce the Foundation’s carbon footprint and reduce the number of cars on Cambridge’s congested roads.
Our proprietary vehicle and pupil tracking software provides peace of mind for parents and saves school staff valuable management time. As we believe in breaking down the barriers to safer and greener transport, earlier this year we made our Essential software plan available to any school completely free, forever.”
This article has also appeared in FE News