Before you start

Sensitivity issues

Before teaching road safety, check if any children have been bereaved by, hurt in, or witnessed a serious road crash, and be sensitive to their needs. Talk to them and their carers about whether they wish to be excluded from lessons or activities that discuss death or injury. (If your school, or any students, experience a bereavement in a road crash, you can see Brake's reports on child bereavement and order our child bereavement support literature to help you support them.)

Getting outside help

Bear in mind that classroom teaching is more effective if combined with practical experiences and campaigning. So if you can build in these three components it will have greater impact:

• classroom teaching
• roadside experiences and training (which must be delivered safely)
• getting the children campaigning for road safety

You can get advice on all three of these elements in this guide, but to successfully deliver on them, especially practical training, you may need or benefit from outside help. For example, road safety officers from local councils often visit schools to run practical pedestrian and cycling training for children. You may also be able to work with emergency services to help you teach road safety in an exciting way, and convey why road safety is important, such as by giving talks in assemblies, or helping to supervise and deliver practical experience-based lessons or discussions.

You might also be able to get help from a local company who could provide funding to aid your road safety work, or volunteers to help supervise, or help you promote a campaign led by the children (for example by providing space to display banners and posters).

You can also make use of Brake's road safety events and programmes for schools to help you bring road safety to life, and link your teaching with a national programme. Many of these include free resource packs and guidelines to help you get involved. In particular, Road Safety Week is an annual, national event coordinated by Brake every May, and a time when hundreds of educators, local councils, emergency services and employers work to promote road safety. Register for a free e-action pack.

Getting everyone on board

You may need to persuade others within your school, kindy or college, such as other teachers, the head or board, about the importance of road safety before you start teaching and promoting it. Here are a few key points you can make to help persuade others:

• Every death or serious injury of a child on roads is devastating for the family, the wider community, and the pre-school, school or college – and every one is preventable. No child should lose their life or suffer a horrendous injury on roads.
• Poor road safety not only means children are in danger of being hurt or killed, it also often affects their health and wellbeing. Children are increasingly being driven to school, and are less likely to regularly walk and cycle, contributing to inactivity, obesity and affecting social development. If streets are unsafe, parents are less willing to let their children walk or cycle.
• Educators can play a vital role in protecting children and stopping devastating casualties by teaching life-saving messages to students, and promoting road safety more widely such as to parents and drivers in the area.
• Schools and colleges can lead the way in making local roads safer, especially enabling children and families to walk and cycle safely. You are at the heart of a community and therefore well placed to work with authorities to help achieve improvements to local roads to make them safer for children and adults, such as through paths, crossings, lower speed limits and better law enforcement. (Read our guide on campaigning.)
• Road safety can help you meet teaching requirements and demonstrate to people in the area that you are a school that cares about students’ safety and wellbeing.
• Road safety is not just a subject for younger children. The older children get, the more at risk they become, as they gain independence. This includes when they are on foot or bicycle, and when they may start to drive or be passengers with other young drivers. Crashes involving young drivers are a big problem, so improving awareness of the risks on roads is crucial for teenagers too.

Getting parents on board

Getting parents on board with your road safety messages is vitally important, given their responsibilities for protecting children, especially at a younger age, and as children are likely to copy their parents' behaviour, including any bad habits. It's therefore a good idea when planning road safety teaching to consider how you can reach out to parents at the same time.

Encouraging parents to behave safely on roads, as drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, and to display positive attitudes towards road safety, will help make sure what you are teaching in the classroom is being positively reinforced at home. Engaging parents with road safety messages can also of course make roads around the school safer by encouraging them to slow down and park safely, or to leave the car at home and walk or cycle to school if there are safe routes.

Some of the activity and teaching ideas below incorporate ways to engage parents, but whatever you're planning you could:

• Include something in your newsletter, website or on social media, and/or send out letters, informing them of what you will be teaching the children and suggesting ways they can reinforce the messages at home and lead by example;
• Encourage parents to sign the Brake Pledge, a six point pledge covering key road safety topics;
• Direct parents to brake.org.nz/families, Brake's road safety advice for families, and directly communicate the key messages;
• Display posters in your reception area promoting road safety activities you're running and road safety messages. These could be posters from Brake, or designed by the children;
• Invite them to attend a demonstration or workshop. This could be of a creative project by the children, such as a screening of a video they have made or performance of a play, or by an external partner, such as emergency service professionals.

Organising resources and materials

There are plenty of resources available from Brake and other agencies such as Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency. We recommend that you utilise a range of interactive, visual and practical resources to make road safety an interesting and engaging subject.

You can explore Brake’s teaching tools and resources, and the low-cost resources available in the Brake shop, or if you're working with older students, make use of tools in our young people and road safety section. Or you can register for one of our events such as a Beep Beep! Day, or Brake's Giant Walk, and receive a free resource pack.

Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency also has a dedicated website for primary and secondary education, offering more teaching activities and worksheets.

Using the right language

Think carefully about what language to use when teaching road safety to communicate its importance in a powerful, memorable and sensitive manner. Brake strongly recommends avoiding the term "road accidents" to describe crashes, deaths and injuries. Road crashes are preventable tragedies - "accident" implies they are inevitable (undermining messages about steps people can take to prevent them) and understates the devastation they can cause.

Be completely open and honest about the seriousness of road safety with children, and of the tragic consequences of road crashes and casualties, particularly with older students. Don't shy away from referring to the deaths and injuries that regularly occur on our roads, and the impact these have. There are ways to do this sensitively, without the need to show lots of blood or other details that could be detrimental to getting the key messages across. See our advice on 'what to teach' for further guidance.

Take care not to glamorise driving, and don't make assumptions about your students' circumstances in regards to being driven or learning to drive. Some may come from families that do not have a car, and some may have no interest in driving. Make it clear that there are sustainable and active alternatives to car use, which are good for you and the planet. Bear in mind that driving is a high-risk activity for young people in particular, and if people learn to drive in their teens they are far more likely to be in a serious crash. Steering young people away from driving if there are alternatives is one of the most important road safety and environmental messages you can convey.

You should also bear in mind a child’s experience of traffic in an urban location will greatly differ from that of a child in a rural location, so adapt your messaging and activities to suit your class profile.