Bob Marshall

EIT researchers have helped pinpoint the many benefits of the Bikes in Schools programme piloted in this region.

A not-for-profit organisation, Bike On New Zealand is the brainchild of husband and wife visionaries Paul McArdle and Meg Frater, who donated $50,000 to seed initiatives aimed at encouraging more people into cycling.

The Bikes in Schools project, officially launched by Prime Minister John Key in 2010, saw three Hawke’s Bay primary schools – St Mary’s, Peterhead and Maraenui Bilingual – each provided with 60 children’s bicycles, three bicycles for staff, bike helmets for all the children at the school, a cycling track around the school grounds, skills and exercise tracks and a storage shed for the bikes.

With funding from the National Heart Foundation, the Hawke’s Bay Medical Research Foundation and the Hawke’s Bay District Health Board, EIT research director Bob Marshall and his colleague Professor Ralph Maddison from the University of Auckland, together with EIT researchers Dr Rachel Forrest and Olivia Maclaren, undertook a staged evaluation over the 2011 school year, recruiting 773 children from the three schools to appraise their fitness, activity levels, body composition and attitudes to cycling.

Parents and teachers were surveyed separately to determine their perceptions of the interventions.

What the evaluation found was that children were overwhelmingly positive about their experience of cycling at school. Teachers noted increased strength, endurance and balance for those who had taken part in the programme.

This was supported by the data, which showed an increase in physical activity correlated with increased fitness and a decrease in body mass index.

Teachers observed improved confidence, perseverance, enhanced social interactions and self management and believed all these aspects translated positively into the classroom.