Teachers and other educators

Teaching road safety to children and young people is vitally important. Children’s health and lifestyles are often heavily influenced by their family’s travel choices and local road safety. Danger from traffic plays a big part in whether they can walk and cycle to school, to the park or to see their friends. It affects their ability to be healthy and socially active.

At Brake, we help children of all ages, from early years to secondary schools, to learn about road safety in a fun and engaging way.

If you work in education and would like free guidance and resources to help you teach road safety to the children and young people you work with, click here to join our educators mailing list to receive regular educators bulletins.

Each month we’ll send you a newsletter, outlining some simple ways to fit the important topic of road safety into your curriculum planning. We’ll provide links to our resources suitable for different age groups and abilities.

Under statutory guidance for RSE and Health Education, from September 2026, all primary and secondary schools are required to teach pupils about road safety under personal safety in the health and wellbeing section of the curriculum.

• For primary schools, this includes how to recognise risk and keep safe around roads.
• For secondary schools, this includes how to identify risk and manage personal safety in increasingly independent situations, including around roads.

Educators are also required to help students learn about recognising and managing peer influence in relation to risk-taking behaviour and personal safety.

The new Government guidelines also require schools to help children learn about grief and bereavement.

Even the youngest children know something about road safety because everyone uses roads, and road danger affects everyone. It’s also a vitally important subject.

It’s never a nice fact to hear, but road crashes are the leading cause of death for children and young people worldwide, and more than six children are killed or seriously injured on roads every day in the UK. The numbers are shocking, and there has been no significant reduction for more than a decade.

Danger from traffic is a big factor in whether children and young people are able to walk and cycle to school, to the park or to see friends, and therefore affects their ability to be healthy and socially active.

Road Safety Week is Brake's biggest annual campaign. Every year, thousands of schools, nurseries, colleges, community groups and organisations take part, reaching millions of children and young people across the UK.

Road Safety Week is a great opportunity to:

• run road safety lessons and assemblies
  
• share important messages with parents and carers and the wider community.

Fundraising for Brake supports our vital work campaigning to end road deatha nd injury and supporting road crash victims. As well as supporting a worthwhile cause, fundraising also helps children and young people understand the concept of helping others and empathise with those less fortunate than themselves.