RoSPA Road Safety

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RoSPA‟s Road Safety Work August 2009 Learning About Safety by Experiencing Risk (LASER) LASER is a powerful interactive approach to safety education that takes place outside the classroom. Its purpose is to educate and enable children so that they can begin to take some care of themselves and others in their immediate community. LASER schemes provide children with opportunities to learn about and practise personal life skills, encouraging them to recognise and deal with the challenges and opportunities they might encounter throughout life, including in the home, when travelling or doing leisure activities. There are about 200 LASER schemes operating around England. Some run all-year-round at permanent venues and others are annual events that open for one to four weeks in a variety of locations. The emergency services and local authority staff play a key role in many events. Schemes run under various names (for example, Crucial Crew, Junior Citizen or Safety Rangers). With funding from the Department of Health, RoSPA identified all the schemes across the country, drew together good practice and published the “LASER Project Good Practice Guidelines”. These can be downloaded free from www.rospa.com/safetyeducation/laser/goodpractice.htm RoSPA then helped to form a voluntary Alliance of LASER Scheme providers to spread good practice and establish future standards, and since 2005, has been undertaking a programme of voluntary accreditation. RoSPA hosts the LASER Forum website, www.lasersafety.org.uk, which gives locations and contact details for permanent and annual schemes across the UK. 8
RoSPA‟s Road Safety Work August 2009 Child Safety Education Coalition (CSEC) RoSPA, in partnership with the National Children‟s Bureau (NCB), and with funding from the DCSF, has established a new organisation called the Child Safety Education Coalition, which will be based at RoSPA‟s offices in Birmingham. The CSEC will work to improve the provision of practical safety education to give more children and young people the skills, knowledge and confidence to keep themselves safe in a range of situations (for example, at home, at play or on the road) and so help reduce the likelihood of injury or harm to children and young people. RoSPA and NCB will also work together to co-ordinate the distribution of safety education for children and young people from all backgrounds. A key focus for CSEC will be vulnerable groups, for example: children from disadvantaged backgrounds who are often at the highest risk of preventable accidents. The objectives of the coalition are to: Define 'high quality practical safety education' for children and young people Increase the distribution, the capacity, and the take up of high quality practical safety education for children and young people Increase provision of high quality practical safety education for hard-to-reach, disadvantaged, disabled and in-care children and young people Research and evaluate the most effective types of practical safety education techniques Make links with safety education schools (PHSE) to ensure learning objectives remain consistent CSEC works to achieve its objectives in a number of ways: Policy and advocacy work partnership building, policy development and media work at national, regional and local levels. Building the evidence base for effective practice encouraging research and evaluation to identify what works; collecting, synthesizing and sharing effective practice; supporting new developments and innovations in line with the evidence. Information sharing disseminating information through an email network, website, newsletters, publications, conferences and training events at national and regional levels and developing resources for schools and other organisations that work with children and young people. Further details are available at www.csec.org.uk/, and from John Vallender CSEC Manager, 0121 248 2114, jvallender@rospa.com 9
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RoSPA Road Safety

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