Hours before heading to Doncaster to announce £17million for South Yorkshire's buses, Transport Secretary and Sheffield Heeley MP Louise Haigh went to a local Sheffield primary school with the mayor, Oliver Coppard, to discuss road safety tactics with pupils.
Members of Mundella Primary School's school council spoke with their MP about reducing the risk they face due to parents driving their cars to and from school every morning and afternoon.
Both the Mayor and Transport Secretary were subject to a grilling by the children, with questions including "What are your plans to get more people on buses?".
Two Mundella Primary School pupils, Alma and Georgia in Year 6, and Oliver Coppard spoke with The Star to make their case for more walking to school.
Members of Mundella Primary School's school council spoke with their MP about reducing the risk they face due to parents driving their cars to and from school every morning and afternoon.
Both the Mayor and Transport Secretary were subject to a grilling by the children, with questions including "What are your plans to get more people on buses?".
Two Mundella Primary School pupils, Alma and Georgia in Year 6, and Oliver Coppard spoke with The Star to make their case for more walking to school.
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NewsTranscript
00:00So Louise, Hay and some other people and police have come and they've come to talk to us so
00:08we've told them about some of our questions and what we think about road safety and potentially
00:14getting some quotes for letters. And so road safety is obviously very important around here
00:19isn't it because you can get quite busy with cars at the start of school and at the end of school
00:24and I think during the meeting with the Mayor and Louise they asked you how many of you have
00:30had to walk in the road to get around cars parked on pavements. Is that something that you two have
00:35had to do? Yes, we sometimes walk together to school and it hasn't been that much of a problem
00:44but I have not that I've had to avoid it but I have seen it happening. I've found sometimes where
00:50it's like literally just a car parked completely on the pavement and sometimes I've had to walk
00:55around but sometimes the path's too narrow so I have to actually go on the road which I think
01:00that's not very safe. And what would you like parents who are driving their kids to school to
01:05do more of? More walking would be good although I completely understand since this would be my
01:11parents. Some people can't always walk since they need to get to school, get to work earlier and
01:18they need to drop their children off at school and it just wouldn't work out for them. So if
01:22people could try their best to walk around when going to school and if they can't then they need
01:29to park which side where they park and then they walk. And to help them where to park we've set up
01:36some signs of places where you can stop, park and then you can walk with your kids to school
01:42then even to then it's not walking the full way but you're still keeping active. I found it slightly
01:48terrifying to be perfectly honest because they asked me quite some difficult questions about what
01:51we're doing about road safety, how we're getting more people on the buses, why people should or
01:55shouldn't park on the roads etc. Things like that and it's been really good to talk to young people
02:00in South Yorkshire particularly around here where I grew up to talk to those kids about what they
02:05want to see from those improvements, what they want to see in terms of buses, in terms of parking, in
02:09terms of bikes, in terms of walking, in terms of wheeling and everything else and they're a joy to
02:13be with. I'm actually genuinely grateful to Louise for listening to us in South Yorkshire. It's always
02:18difficult when you've got the Secretary of State in the region because she has to absolutely of
02:21course be fair to the whole of the country and that's exactly what she's done but that means
02:24investing in places like South Yorkshire where we haven't been well treated before by the last
02:28government, we didn't get the money we thought we needed, we asked the government for a huge amount
02:32of investment in South Yorkshire's public transport and they simply didn't listen and Louise clearly
02:36is. So getting that more investment that we need and to be able to invest in buses to improve
02:40services to hopefully over time bring in cheaper fares for kids in particular means that actually
02:44we can do a huge amount more and that's down to Louise and this government. None of this stuff's
02:48quick, none of this stuff's easy, there's no money to go around frankly but Louise is doing her very
02:52best to get places like South Yorkshire the money that we do need and deserve.