Teaching a child to cycle can be both beautiful and challenging. For trainers, the two extremes of child cyclist behaviour can be summarised as the Connor and the Caitlin. Connor lives on his bike, pulls wheelies at every opportunity, doesn’t particularly care which side of the road he cycles on and has decided to do a course to get out of maths. Caitlin has a shiny new mountain bike she rides on Sundays in the park, and mum and dad have drilled into her that roads are dangerous, so if she goes anywhere on her bike, she goes by pavement. She’s doing a course (in her cycle helmet) because mum and dad think road safety is very important.

At Mansel school on Sheffield’s Parson Cross estate, there are very few Caitlins. Parson Cross kids are not daft, as we say up here. In one of the city’s most deprived neighbourhoods, they know a bike is a means of fun and freedom, so on the whole they can already ride pretty well. So, they say, in the tilt of their heads, as they weigh you up in your cycle instructor tabard, what can you teach us? Answer: to ride your bike on the road. Whether it’s a school in Nick Clegg’s wealthy suburbs or on one of David Blunkett’s estates, this is what makes Connors and Caitlins sit up and start listening.

Bikeability is the country’s new and expanding on-road cycle training scheme, and is already taking place in half of England’s local authorities, a figure expected to rise to 75% by December. By 2012 the national Bikeability target is for all children to be offered the training before they leave primary school. To this end, over the next three years the government will spend £60m on cycle training and other measures to encourage children to cycle more.

And it’s needed. A study recently published by Cycling England found that most parents don’t allow their children the cycling freedom they enjoyed themselves. The survey found that four out of five didn’t let their children cycle to school on their own, despite a fall in cycle casualties over recent years.

Cycle training is the start of the process to get children cycling again, says Philip Darnton, chair of Cycling England. “Training appeases that sense of fear and overturns the worries parents have about the danger of cycling. I appreciate their concerns, but I’d say to parents that doing nothing is more dangerous. It costs £8bn for the NHS to treat obesity now, and that’s going to get worse if today’s children don’t get the exercise they need. Cycling is also a good way for children to regain their sense of independence and freedom. They can’t be tied to mum’s apron strings for ever.”

On Parson Cross, mums don’t have aprons. Can we show you how we can wheelie the length of the playground, the children inquire. No, but we can show you how to make sure your brakes are working and ensure you have the basic level one Bikeability skills needed before moving on to level two road training.

After a couple of weeks, the Connors are concentrating and Caitlins of both sexes stop bailing out on to the pavement whenever a car appears. As they ride through a series of junctions on roads near their own school, their confidence grows – and as a result, here in South Yorkshire, trained children really do cycle to school.

One of our first Bikeability trainees was an archetypal Connor, from inner-city Rotherham. He loved his bike, wanted to ride it every second, and had to stay calm by whistling to himself when his instructor was talking. A few months later, he appeared next to us at a set of traffic lights in the town centre. He stopped in pedal-ready position, made a face at the traffic camera when the lights changed, and sped away, held his lane, made a life-saver check, executed a perfect right turn and rode away home through the industrial estates of Rotherham. A beautiful sight.

· David Bocking is a member of the Pedal Ready cycle training cooperative.

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