An award of £50,000 from Bristol 2015 European Green Capital Challenge had already funded the technological development of the smart-phone application called Crocodile. The Cabot Institute project, funded by its Innovation Fund, aimed to collect pilot data from schools and families on their experiences of using the “Crocodile” smart-phone application.  The project worked with key stakeholders to develop a broader package to support schools in using the app.

Aims of the project

The key aims of the project were to:

• Aid the development of the Crocodile ‘informal parent network’ online platform and thereby to increase active transport to school
• Understand more about how using the Crocodile App influences active transport to school in the context of whole school active transport behaviour in primary schools.

Who was involved in the research?

The following academics from the University of Bristol's Cabot Institute were involved in this research project.

• Dr Emma Solomon-Moore (Policy Studies)
• Professor Russ Jago (Policy Studies) 
• Dr Ruth Kipping (Social and Community Medicine)

Other collaborators included members of Bristol City Council, Sustrans, schools, University staff and members of the Crocodile team at a project workshop.

What happened

The researchers met with the Crocodile team on multiple occasions to help them to develop the online platform and to provided advice based on their knowledge of active school travel interventions.  The researchers piloted the intervention with four schools in Bristol around Walk to School Week (16 - 20 May 2016), two were randomly allocated as intervention schools or control schools. 

Questionnaires were sent home with all children in each of the four schools both pre- (early May 2016) and post- (early June 2016) the pilot intervention. The questionnaires were designed to be completed by parents, and included questions on family demographics (child age, socio-economic status), child travel mode to/from school, parent travel mode to work, and awareness and use of the Crocodile online platform.

From the four schools, we received 322 responses from parents pre-intervention (27.6% response rate), and 210 responses from parents post-intervention (18.0% response rate). Pre-intervention, children in the intervention schools travelled to (75.4%; p<0.001) and from (76.1%; p=0.006) school more actively than children in the control schools (59.8% and 63.6% respectively). Post-intervention, there was no difference in active transport between children in the intervention and control schools for either going to (77.5% vs. 66.7%; p=0.05) or coming home from (76.7% vs. 71.9%; p=0.40) school. Children in the control schools increased their active transport to/from school post-intervention by more than the children in the intervention schools, but none of the changes were significant (p>0.05). These results indicate that for schools who received the Crocodile intervention, there was no evidence of an increase in active transport to school. Post-intervention, compared to parents in the control schools (6.7%), 44.3% of parents in the intervention schools were aware of the Crocodile online platform. However, when asked whether they had used the online platform, only 3.8% responded ‘yes, once’, 6.6% responded ‘no, only downloaded’ and the remaining parents responded ‘no, never’. This demonstrates that the Crocodile team were fairly successful in making parents aware of the online platform, however, they were less successful at turning this awareness into actual use of the online platform.  

The overall conclusion is that in its current form, the Crocodile online platform does not improve active transport to school, probably because it was not widely used. However, the intervention is still under development and with the right investment of time and ability to engage schools and parents, there is potential for it to be a successful intervention in the future.

Next steps

The researchers will be keeping in contact with the Crocodile project team in future months to keep a track on how the project has been developing, and whether there is any potential to apply for funding to conduct any further research when they are at a more developed stage of piloting the intervention.