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.
On this pages, we give some guidance to help you teach road safety to children and young people of all ages and abilities in a fun and engaging way.
Road safety on the curriculum
Under new 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.
Let's talk about road safety
Using the right language
- Avoid the term accident. Road crashes are preventable tragedies – calling them 'accidents' understates the devastation they cause, implies they are inevitable and undermines messages about the ways in which they can be prevented. Use words like crash, collision or incident instead.
- Talk openly and honestly about the seriousness of road safety with children, and the tragic consequences of road death and injury.
- Talk about deaths and injuries that regularly occur on roads, and the impact these have on everyone involved.
- Don't glamorise driving or make assumptions about people’s circumstances. Not all families have a car, and not all young people are interested in learning to drive.
- Talk about how young drivers are at greater risk of being involved in a road crash due to age and inexperience.
- Talk about the benefits of active travel which is good for people and good for the planet.
- Remember that people’s experiences of traffic in urban and rural locations can be very different. Adapt your messaging and activities to suit your situation.
Everyone has the right to safe and healthy journeys
Safe journeys happen when we design our streets, roads and cycle paths so that the mistakes we make don’t result in death or serious injury.
Healthy journeys are important to help keep us active and happy. Choosing to walk or cycle shouldn’t put us at increased risk, and the air we breathe on these journeys should be clean too.
The solutions to create safe and healthy journeys are known and available to us now. We need to create safe spaces for people who walk and cycle, and ensure that vehicles on our roads are as safe as possible, and that traffic moves at safe speeds. This is known as the ‘safe system’ approach to road safety.
Brake supports the safe system approach to road safety and this is reflected in the resources we provide to teach road safety.
We are all responsible for using roads safely to protect ourselves and other people
We all make mistakes sometimes, and if we make a mistake on a road the consequences can be really serious. The good news is that a few small changes can make a big difference.
Whoever we are, and however we travel, the choices we make can help us protect ourselves and each other on our roads.
For people who walk and wheel, this means using pavements and cycle paths safely, obeying the rules of the road, paying attention when crossing roads and crossing at safe places.
For parents and carers, this means holding children’s hands when walking near roads, crossing road at safe places and always using a child seat when travelling by car.
For people who drive and ride, this means pledging to drive and ride as safely as possible, keeping to safe speeds, avoiding distractions and never driving or riding when impaired by drugs or alcohol.
The Highway Code is very clear that those with the potential to do the most harm on roads have the greatest responsibility to protect people who are more vulnerable then them.
Get help from others
Learning about road safety in the classroom is most effective when combined with practical experiences and campaigning.
Here are some ways you can work with others to support your classroom teaching:
- road safety officers from local authorities can visit schools to run pedestrian and cycling training
- emergency services professionals can give talks in assemblies, or supervise and deliver practical, experience-based lessons or discussions.
- local companies may be able to provide funding to support your road safety work or volunteers to help.
What to teach at each phase of education
Get support after a road crash
Brake’s National Road Victim Service is available to anyone who is supporting someone bereaved or injured in a road crash.
References and further reading
- World Health Organization (2018) Global status report on road safety 2018
- Department for Transport (2019) Reported road casualties Great Britain: 2018, Table RAS30002
- Brake (2017) Inspire, Inform, Engage: Developing a pragmatic approach to road safety and sustainable transport education interventions