Make road safety education part of the curriculum

LARSOA, the Local Authority Road Safety Officers’ Association, wants road safety education to be an integral part of the school curriculum.

The government has announced an overhaul of England’s secondary curriculum to give teachers more flexibility to teach other subjects such as finance and cookery and languages, for example, Mandarin and Urdu.

But LARSOA believes road safety education should be an immediate priority when road collisions are the most common cause of accidental death for young people.

Recent road accident figures showed an increase in deaths among child pedestrians and child pedal cyclists. In 2006 169 children died on the roads and the combined numbers of those killed and seriously injured was 3,294 – nine children every day of the year.

At present road safety education in the UK is not compulsory but making school travel and safety a more formal part of the educational process could be more powerful than relying on voluntary uptake.

The ROSE 25 report by the European Commission recommends a minimum of ten hours of road safety education in school per year.*

David Frost, a Press and PR spokesman for LARSOA, said: “The Road Casualty Report Great Britain 2006 report shows that child road deaths increased by 20% in 2005. Our child pedestrian and child cyclist fatality rates are far too high.

“These are not just statistics and numbers, they are children and every one injured is a tragedy for their family.

“We know road safety education works. A four year evaluation of the Kerbcraft child pedestrian training national pilot confirms and reinforces the positive behavioural impact of practical roadside training for children as young as five years old.

“Children trained following the Kerbcraft approach show consistent and significant improvements in finding safe places to cross. Trained children show safer road crossing behaviour from between parked cars, and are significantly better at avoiding obstructions at junctions.

“Let’s put road safety education on the curriculum – what more vital life skill could we give our children than how to stay safe on the roads?”

ABOUT LARSOA

LARSOA is a national road safety organisation representing road safety officers (RSOs) employed in local government across the UK.

LARSOA represents 185 of the 200 eligible local authorities across the UK, assisting RSOs to fulfil their statutory role to reduce the number and severity of road casualties through education, training and publicity programmes.

LARSOA publishes an up-to-date round-up of road safety news from across the UK on its website www.larsoa.org.uk .

LARSOA also aims to influence national debate - government policy and action together with public opinion. The association works to achieve national recognition for road safety issues, commissions research into behaviour which contributes to road collisions and develops national road safety campaigns.

The association assists in identifying achievable national targets to reduce the number of collisions on the country's roads.