WOW is a walking incentive scheme for primary schools, where children record how they travel to school every day using the interactive WOW Travel Tracker. Pupils are rewarded with a monthly badge if they travel actively to school at least once a week.
Tactran are delighted to be supporting this amazing project with continued funding through People & Place in 2026/27. Living Streets Scotland has been delivering WOW and additional engagement with schools in the Tactran region for 21 years.
Car usage on the school run encourages inactivity in children and young people and creates air pollution and traffic congestion at the school gate. Living Streets work supports walking as the natural choice for everyday, local journeys, for the betterment of people, places, and the planet. They believe that one of the most impactful journeys to switch to active travel is the school run. Not only does this improve the physical and mental wellbeing of students, parents/guardians and school staff, but it also provides valuable bonding time for peers and families, and helps to reduce carbon emissions and noisy, inconvenient traffic around schools streets for the local community.
WOW Travel Tracker is an interactive web-based tool for measuring how children travel to school each day. It offers an engaging and fun way for children to record their journeys to school, via compatible touchscreens, classroom electronic whiteboards, tablets and PCs. Combined with monthly WOW badges, WOW forms a complete monitoring and reward system. It automatically calculates numbers of pupils eligible for WOW badges each month and allows detailed reports to be generated at class, school, local and combined authority level. WOW Travel Tracker won the 2022 Scottish Transport Award for ‘Best Practice in Travel to School and Work Schemes’.
Face to Face Engagement can include a launch assembly, staff training, TT training, school gate events with WOW mascot, Strider, Park and Stride set up support. WOW has an element of flexibility which enables project coordinators to tailor support to suit the needs and requirements of individual schools.
More information: https://www.livingstreets.org.uk/walk-to-school/primary-schools/wow-the-walk-to-school-challenge/