80
Students travel safely to and from St Mary's with Kura, every day
7
Number of routes tracked
St Mary’s School in Cambridge
Kura has helped St Mary’s School in Cambridge revolutionise its school transport provision – helping students and parents as well as the environment.
As a city, Cambridge is trying to tackle air pollution created by vehicles, such as with its five park and ride sites, and proposed congestion charges to fund the expansion of its bus network and improve infrastructure for walking and cycling.
Supporting the city’s goal to become a healthier, cleaner, and greener city, some independent schools such as St Mary’s School have looked at how their own pupils travel.
In June 2021, the girls’ school enlisted the help of Kura to support its own green initiatives – a relationship still going strong as it continues to offer shared school transport in a bid to minimise traffic and cut CO2 emissions.
Greg Ball, operations manager at St Mary’s School, said Kura’s technology has helped the school give greater peace of mind to parents, as well as cutting carbon emissions from transport with shared school buses.
He said: “Using Kura’s cutting-edge app has completely revolutionised our school’s transport provision. There are huge benefits, not only for our students and parents, but also for the environment.
“By moving to a more digitised service, our parents have gained extra peace of mind knowing when their daughters get on and off the bus. This has encouraged more use of our shared transport offer by our school community. In turn, this has reduced the impact of traffic in our local area.”
Kura’s digitised services have helped St Mary’s School with its motivated approach to safeguarding its girls.
Greg said: “As a school, ensuring the wellbeing of our students is our utmost priority. Kura enables us to provide a safer, more efficient transport service and the app allows us to adjust our routes and our offer to best serve our students and parents.”
Currently, there are seven home to school routes, with the majority park and ride, for 80 St Mary’s School pupils – all shared journeys helping to reduce air pollution.
And Kura has helped staff at St Mary’s School breathe easier too, by replacing outdated paper manifests with digitised versions of trips and passengers, making life easier when it comes to admin, inspections, and future route planning.
The Kura Observer App and Kura portal helps the school manage daily trips, so journeys can be booked, reviewed, changed, or cancelled with ease, as well as offering tracking and messaging should there be any unforeseen traffic delays.
St Mary’s School is now looking ahead to the future, with plans to utilise more of Kura’s technology in the next academic year.
NFC swipe cards will be introduced to enable unique boarding for each pupil to further enhance safeguarding.
Parents will also be able to book morning school-bound and afternoon home-bound journeys in the Kura Observer App, selecting the dates, routes and stops they want to book.
The Observer App allows parents to track a child’s school bus journey in real time, so they know exactly when their child boards and leaves the vehicle, where the bus is and if there are any delays, all via an app on their phone.