Pedestrian accidents are one of the most prominent causes of injury, handicap and death in the modern world. In children, the problem is so severe that pedestrian accidents are widely regarded as the most serious of all health risks facing children in developed countries. Educational measures have long been advocated as a means of teaching children how to cope with traffic and substantial resources have been devoted to their development and provision. Whilst the benefits of imparting sound road safety education to children cannot be. overemphasized, the aims and methods of contemporary road safety education must be clearly established.

No educational program can expect to succeed unless it is founded on clear and explicitly stated objectives. Without these, the program would be unfocussed and evaluation impossible. Deciding how to set concrete objectives remains a fundamental problem in road safety education. The best way of doing this is to carry out a detailed analysis of the activity of the pedestrian road user, breaking it down into the component skills and strategies required to deal with the various problems encountered in traffic. Understanding the skills and strategies needed to interact with traffic would seem an obvious starting point for the development of educational objectives.

Pedestrians require a range of fundamental skills in order to interact safely with traffic. They must also learn to deploy these skills strategically at the roadside. Even crossing a simple road requires competence in a range of primary cognitive skills. If these skills are not properly developed, the pedestrian’s crossing decisions will almost certainly be inadequate.

From an educational point of view, it is therefore vital to know how these skills develop in childhood and what level of skill can be expected in children of different ages. It is also essential to know whether baseline performance can be improved through education or training and, if so, at what age intervention is likely to be effective.

Children need a range of fundamental psychological skills in order to interact with traffic, together with the ability to deploy these strategically in different traffic situations. Viable objectives in road safety education would be to operationally define skills and strategies and devise appropriate training procedures whereby they might be improved. The critical aspect would appear to be that the training should be practical in nature.

Teaching safety skills to children can provide lifelong benefits to society but it is a long-term intervention strategy. Experience in many countries has shown that reliance on individuals or organizations visiting schools to give talks on road safety are not effective on their own. Children may remember the messages in the short term, but effective and sustainable development of positive attitudes towards road safety are best achieved by inclusion in the core curriculum, as a compulsory subject in its own right. Training is best done in schools by professional teachers who have themselves been trained in safety issues relevant to school children.

Road user education and awareness raising is an important part of any road safety strategy. To be effective such activity must be based on analysis of data and should be designed and monitored in a systematic way to ensure success.

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