Cash boost for road safety projects

The DfT’s ‘Road Safety Challenge Fund’ is to provide £216,000 for 17 projects that aim to improve road safety in Great Britain.

The majority of the winning projects focus on various aspects of child road safety but other subjects covered included occupational road safety and speeding.

While most of the projects are run by national organisations such as RoSPA, BRAKE, the Child Accident Prevention Trust (CAPT), The Portman Group and RAC Motoring Services, some organisations are more locally based.

The schemes that will receive financial support are as follows:

Ape Theatre Company
£20,000 - Pills Thrills and Automobiles. The grant will fund a play aimed at reducing drug related accidents among 16-18 year olds.

Brake
£10,000 - Schools action packs. The money will fund Road Safety Week ‘action packs’ for schoolteachers, nursery leaders and youth club leaders.

£4,190 - Getting the Road Safety Message Across - a communications strategy for road safety professionals. This project will provide a communications strategy for road safety professionals, with the support of LARSOA.

The Child Accident Prevention Trust
£10,000 - Child Safety Week aims to raise awareness levels within local communities through those best able to influence children and their parents/carers with regard to avoiding accidents.

Oxford Brookes University
£10,000 - Pedestrian visibility: improving children’s understanding and behaviour. This one-off project aims to develop a computer-based tool to improve children's awareness of pedestrian visibility and will take place at the Lifeskills centre in Bristol. The lessons learned will be incorporated into Lifeskills permanent training, which reaches 8,500 children per year.

RAC Motoring Services
£18,447.63 - Grass Routes: investigating safer journeys. This project aims to raise awareness of road safety and road hazards among 11-14 year olds through a schools resource pack, which will be made available to all secondary schools in the UK.

RoSPA
£20,000 - Child restraints video. Production of a video and DVD giving advice on choosing and using child car restraints and practical demonstrations of how too properly fit them.

£16,807.50 - Redevelopment of the ORSA website. This project is to redevelop and manage the Occupational Road Safety Alliance’s website.

£12,007 - Resource for parents (and other non-professional trainers) who supervise L-drivers. The purpose of this project is to produce advice for parents to help their children learn to drive.

£10,868 - 'Presenting Road Safety: A guide for the media'. The purpose of this project is to revise and re-publish RoSPA's media guide. Free copies of the guide will be distributed to all local authorities, road safety related organisations, the main media organisations and regulatory bodies.

£19,835 - 'Education resource for Keystage 1 children with English as second language'. This project will produce a spiral bound, stand up book for use with Key Stage 1 children whose first language is not English. The book will feature clear and simple road safety messages in Bengali, Urdu and Punjabi and English.

£16,598 - 'Road safety resource file: keystage 4 citizenship'. A resource for use by teachers to allow students to develop the skills, knowledge and understanding outlined in the Keystage 4 (KS4) Citizenship programme of study by using road safety issues.

£7,712 - 'Driving for work: safer journey planner'. The production and distribution of a work-related version of the 'Safer Journey Planner' which RoSPA produced in 2001. The target audience will be employers, managers and staff who drive (or ride) for work.

£2,676 - Reprint of the Guidelines for the Management and Operation of Practical Child Cyclist Schemes.

The Portman Group
£10,318 – ‘I'll be Des’ campaign packs. The project will produce 1,000 I'll be Des campaign packs for RSOs.

University of Newcastle upon Tyne
£19,800 - Kerbcraft road safety training video. The video will complement the ongoing management and evaluation of the National Network of Child Pedestrian Training Schemes - the DfT is currently funding 100 road safety training schemes between 2002-2006.

West Yorkshire Police Community Trust
£7,000 - ROADS (Reduce our accidents decrease speed). This project will fund 50 Young Citizen Panels to influence road users in West Yorkshire to decrease their speed.

Applications for grants under £5,000 can be submitted at any time. Grants for over £5,000 will be considered in April and October each year, for applications received by 1 April and 1 October respectively. Applications that cannot be considered due to lack of available funds at the time can be resubmitted for the following year.

Full details of the successful grant projects, and an application form, can be obtained from John Doyle, Department for Transport, Zone 2/13, Great Minster House, 76 Marsham Street, London SW1P 4DR (tel. 020 7944 2026, John.Doyle@dft.gsi.gov.uk).

More @ http://www.dft.gov.uk/pns