Positive evaluation for early years initiative

An initiative designed to deliver road safety messages to young children has received positive feedback through the E-valu-it* process.

This partnership road safety initiative from Bath and North East Somerset Council provides a long-term approach to communicating road safety messages for children aged 3-4 years and their parents/carers.

Historically, childcare providers have found it difficult to source appropriate activities to introduce road safety to very young children. An opportunity arose to address this issue through the roll out of the Healthy Early Years (HEY) Project.

Two teams from Bath and North East Somerset Council combined forces to develop a high quality road safety package to be delivered to young children, as part of the HEY Project. The teams were the Traffic and Safety Team and the Early Years Foundation Stage Team. The aim of the pilot was to inform setting staff, children and their parents/carers. All three groups were evaluated using E-valu-it and the results are favourable.

The evaluation process confirmed that as a result of the initiative children and some parents had a greater awareness of appropriate road safety messages. Setting staff (people working in a child care facility) were pleased to be able to have a structure for delivering road safety information and were clear on appropriate road safety messages and how to deliver such messages for families.

The project can also be adopted for use with Reception classes in primary schools to give children a solid grounding in road safety which will be built upon as they progress through their school years.

For more information contact Fiona Capener at Bath & North East Somerset Council on 01225 395902.

Click here to read the E-valu-it report.

Footnote: Developed by the DfT and RoSPA, E-valu-it is an online tool designed to increase and improve the measures of effectiveness of road safety education, training and publicity (ETP) and to improve the efficient use of road safety ETP resources. E-valu-it asks a series of questions about the intervention, the issue(s) it is meant to address, its aims and objectives and a few other details. E-valu-it then provides recommendations for evaluating the intervention, plus a template for recording the data collected during the evaluation, which then becomes the final evaluation report once it is completed.