A WALNEY teacher is fronting a campaign to change the law on school zebra crossings.

Year 5 teacher Mrs Banks from South Walney Junior School started the campaign after a number of ‘near misses’ outside the primary school.

The teacher has reached out to footballer turned children’s campaigner Marcus Rashford to get their petition off the ground.

The petition entitled Crossings 4 Kidz states: “We want a zebra crossing directly outside our school gates to ensure that children can cross safely into school.

“Ideally, we believe that it should be law that ALL schools should have a zebra crossing directly outside of their school entrance.

“We have had a number of near misses and accidents outside school on a very busy road.

People are not following the rules and are parking on double yellows, zig zags and the speed hump.

Only a zebra crossing will stop them.”

The petition is addressed to Keith Little, Highways Cumbria and Helen Wall, Mayor of Barrow.

Mrs Banks said: “SWJS Year 5 have set up a petition for a zebra crossing outside of our school gates but we want to make it law that all schools have a zebra crossing outside entrances.

Please help us by signing the petition and sharing it far and wide.”

The location of zebra crossings are decided by the council and are based on a variety of factors.

A spokesperson for the council said: “We identify pedestrian crossings from a number of sources such as engineering safety studies where there are accident clusters, and the Better Ways to School programme where we are improving safety and encouraging more pupils to walk to school.

The justification and the type of crossing depend upon a number of factors which may include: the number of pedestrians, the number of vehicles, the width of the road, the speed of traffic and the pedestrian injury accident record at the site.”

You can sign the petition at https://bit.ly/3u3eVvv