A YOUNG girl is among the winners of a national competition to design a collectable badge.

Olivia, 7, from St Bede’s Catholic Primary School in Basingstoke, is one of the 11 young designers named as winners of a national design competition held by UK charity Living Streets.

The competition, called The WOW Badge Design Competition, called on over 115,000 primary school pupils from all over the UK to design collectable badges.

The theme of this year’s WOW Badge Design Competition was “Walk through time”, with pupils encouraged to research a pre-historic or historic period and depict it as a badge; winning entries included space travel, the invention of the internet, dinosaurs, the women’s suffrage movement and more.

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Olivia’s design depicted a woolly mammoth; about her design, Olivia said: “I chose to draw a woolly mammoth because I read a story about them, and they look like big fluffy teddy bears.

“When I read the examples, the dinosaurs were too scary!”

The winning designs will be turned into more than 300,000 badges that will be awarded to pupils taking part in WOW, a pupil-led initiative where children self-report how they get to school every day.

If participating pupils travel sustainably, such as walking or biking, once a week for a month, they will be rewarded with a badge.

On average, schools taking part in WOW experience a 30 per cent reduction in cars at the school gates and a 23 per cent increase in children walking to school.

Stephen Edwards, CEO of Living Streets, said: “WOW is a great way to help keep children healthy and happy by encouraging them to be active every day.

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“More children walking to school also means fewer cars around the school gates - making them safer and cleaner places.

“We hope that designing this set of WOW badges has inspired pupils and helped them to understand that walking and wheeling to school has many benefits, whether social, road safety, health, or environmental.”

Living Streets is a charity that aims to create a better walking environment and encourage people to walk more; the charity was founded in 1929 and has been active for over 90 years.

The winning designs from the WOW Badge Design Competition can be viewed online at https://www.livingstreets.org.uk/badgecomp.

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