Hands Up Scotland Survey 2021

Organisation: Sustrans Scotland

Date of Publication: May 2022

Uploaded to Knowledge Centre: 16 June 2022

The annual Hands Up Scotland Survey looks at how pupils across Scotland travel to school and nursery. Established in 2008, the survey has been providing an insight into journeys to school for more than a decade and is the largest national dataset on school travel.

The 2021 survey shows that the percentage of pupils travelling actively to school in Scotland during 2021 remained close to the levels seen during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The survey, answered by 418,000 school pupils and over 37,000 nursery children, found that 50.3% normally travel to school in an active way, without any form of motorised transport.

This is down from a high of 51.2% in 2020, but is still higher than pre-pandemic levels of 47.8% in 2019.

At 43.6%, walking remains the most common way school pupils get to school.

Although there has been a decrease from the 44.8% in 2020, the figure remains up on the 2019 number of 41%.

The number of pupils cycling to school continues to rise, up from 3.8% in 2020 to 4.0% in 2021 – as does the number who normally scoot or skate, up from 2.6% in 2020 to 2.7% in 2021.

Click on the link below to see the survey results:

https://www.sustrans.org.uk/our-blog/projects/uk-wide/scotland/hands-up-scotland-survey/