Tuesday 30 March 2010

Theft at second Dr Bike day at LBTS

A few more bikes brought in today - though rain in the morning put off a few probably.
A couple of members of staff brought their bikes to us and left them with us as the pupils had. Come 3pm several pupils arrived to collect their bikes and shortly afterwards a teacher who discovers his bike is no longer there. Someone's had the brass neck to pick up a bike that isn't theirs - we think the culprit was with a pupil and presumably was one himself. Hopefully CCTV as the school will pick them up and the bike'll come back. Maybe peer / teacher pressure too?

Lessons learnt:
1. Running a Dr Bike type of event we need to use raffle tickets - one on bike; one to pupil and collect only against raffle ticket. And lock bikes up that aren't being worked on at that moment.
2. Pupils may be unwilling to bring bikes to school if there's a fairly strong likelihood of theft by other pupils. Certainly there's more need for decent locks and use of them by the student (and staff) body.

One of the intents of these days was to get closer to the pupils; gain an understanding of the quality of bikes and determine some of the issues that we may need to resolve. So, it's certainly helped this to some degree!

On a more positive note we had more pupils coming up saying they hadn't brought their bike in but were really interested in the next opportunity.

We'll need to make sure that the staff member gets his bike replaced with an equivalent if it doesn't come back in the next day or two.