Transport technology specialist Kura has announced plans to offer schools free trials of its school transport technology. The company’s no-obligation 90-day trial includes its full suite of vehicle tracking, safeguarding and route management technologies, and trial users have access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager to guide them through the initial phase and ensure they achieve their goals.
The firm said its free trial offer has been designed to help school management teams get proof of impact before making important investment decisions, following research that reveals how Covid-19 has put vital investment plans on hold for one in eight schools across the country.
By opening up access for schools to implement transport innovations, Kura says it is removing the barriers between squeezed school budgets and schools’ abilities to offer a first-class transport service, and as a result helping to incentivise parents to trust their child’s travel needs to the school, opening up new catchment areas and reducing school run congestion and emissions.
Participating schools will be able to use Kura’s registration software to keep track of who has travelled on the bus each day, with contact-tracing functionality included. Meanwhile, parents will have visibility of when their children arrive at school and at home, and that they are travelling with pre-approved passengers, ensuring pupil safeguarding.
Through the scheme, Kura’s goal is to remove thousands of cars from the road and around the school gates every day, improving pupil safety while significantly reducing schools’ collective carbon footprint. The company said that if 10 schools were to sign up to the trial, it could equate to 50,000 kilogrammes of CO2 saved on average, through pupils and parents opting for shared school transport as opposed to low-occupancy cars. It added that each 49-seat coach removes 31 cars from the road on average, accounting for thousands of car-led journeys being phased out in favour of greener alternatives.
While figures cited by Kura show that almost a third of school leaders believe the level of traffic around their schools each day is a safety risk, and 22% are concerned with the level of toxic fumes around their school, action to reduce this has been limited, with only around a fifth of schools having invested in technology to improve their own school transport offering over the past decade. However, further investigation reveals that Covid-19 has significantly hindered investment, with 12.8% of schools reporting that Covid-19 placed investment plans on hold.
Godfrey Ryan, CEO of Kura, said: “We are fully confident in our software’s ability to deliver value to schools, but we are also mindful of the difficulties Covid-19 has placed on their budgets. This free trial means school leaders have the opportunity to test the full features of the product without any obligation to commit. Moreover, and in light of recent, global conversations around the environment and sustainability, we hope the trials will also reignite the case for getting more children to use shared transport to reduce the number of cars on the road and thus levels of pollution. Since launching our software-only solution last year, Kura now transports over 15,000 students every day across more than 30 schools and MATs. We and our existing customers know the software’s power and the benefits it delivers so we are quietly confident that schools will stick with us.”
Launched in 2019, Kura believes that its school transport technology has ‘revolutionised’ home-to-school travel by making shared, school-managed transport a safer, greener, more efficient alternative to the current daily school run, removing thousands of car journeys from the roads each day. In late 2020, Kura launched a tech-only offering to provide a more tailored, scalable solution to better fit varying school budgets.
