Road safety education

Children and young people are vulnerable road users, with each age group presenting unique risks, depending on developmental and environmental milestones. Best practice road safety education focuses on establishing practical knowledge, skills, strategies and risk awareness through regular and consistent education at each stage of a child’s development.

We take a whole–of–life approach to road safety education that contributes to outcomes where children and young people are equipped with the capabilities to become responsible and safe road users throughout their life. Whole-of-life education and skills development helps embed positive road safety behaviours to ensure road users make safe decisions over the course of their lifetime.

The whole–of–life approach has been organised into 6 strategic pillars. These pillars represent separate but equally important areas of focus for the delivery and coordination of road safety education for children and young people. The strategic pillars are grouped based on the following elements:

• cognitive, social and physical developmental milestones
• differing travel modes undertaken at each stage of life
• unique road safety risk factors facing higher risk communities
• capacity for leadership and coordination by those who can influence behaviour, including parents and carers, educators, government, and the wider community.

A series of Good Practice Guidelines have been developed for Pillars 1 to 4, available at good practice guidelines on road safety education.

Learn more about road safety education.

Early Childhood Road Safety Education

National Practices for Early Childhood Road Safety Education

The early years are a critical time to introduce key concepts for lifelong learning. Road safety education is an important component of early childhood education as it lays the foundation for children to become safe road users.

The National Practices for Early Childhood Road Safety Education have been developed by early childhood education and road safety experts across Australia and New Zealand. The 8 national practices are aligned with the Early Years Learning Framework, which forms the basis of early childhood education policy-making in Australia.

A set of explanatory guides have been developed to assist with planning road safety activities, available at Road safety in early childhood.

Journi — A free online road safety education program for year 5 and 6

Journi is an online road safety education program designed primarily for use in year 5 and 6 classrooms. Journi uses graphic novel-style animations and gamified learning activities to be fun and memorable for students and offers 4 flexible modules that are easy for teachers to use and adapt to suit their individual classroom environments.

Supporting the online experience is a suite of offline learning resources, complete with lesson plans and student activities developed by curriculum experts to align with the new Version 9 Australian Curriculum. Educators and students from both metropolitan and regional areas were engaged throughout the design and testing process to ensure their feedback was incorporated into the program.

As part of our efforts to promote Journi, we've partnered with the Australian Road Safety Foundation to engage directly with teachers, schools and education networks across Queensland.

For more information visit Journi.