Inverness pupils to get road safety tips
More than three hundred primary 6 and 7 pupils are gathering today and tomorrow in Inverness and Caithness to be trained in new roles as Junior Road Safety Officers (JRSO) for their schools.
Cllr Allan Henderson, Chair of Highland Council's Environment, Development and Infrastructure Committee said: “Saving lives is what these two very important training days are all about. The training provided helps senior pupils to deliver the important role of Junior Road Safety Officer in their areas. It empowers them to share road safety education information to their fellow pupils; encourages them to adopt sustainable travel choices and fosters a safe and healthy Highland school population.”
Training days have been organised by The Highland Council’s Road Safety Team for Wednesday 8 May from 10am to 2pm at Eden Court, Inverness and on Thursday 9 May from 10:30 to 1:30pm at the Pulteney Centre in Wick.
The JRSO programme in Scotland puts children in control of highlighting road safety issues within their own school. A particularly empowering programme, it gives senior primary pupils the opportunity to become JRSOs for a year. Their tasks are:
- to organise a road safety noticeboard,
- learn how to use jrso.com,
- deliver safety presentations to classes or assemblies and
- run school road safety competitions.
At the training day new JRSO’s will be provided information from a number of organisations (in addition to Highland Council) to help them undertake their roles within their schools including: Scottish Fire and Rescue Service; Road Safety Scotland; Breedons; Sustrans; HITRANS; Living Streets and Police Scotland.
At the Inverness event 250 Junior Road Safety Officers will take part for 56 schools and at the Wick event, 61 Junior Road Safety Officers will be attending the training representing 16 schools.
The core resource for the Junior Road Safety Officer programme is its website www.jrso.com (external link), which includes a ‘members only' area specifically for JRSOs.