The Scottish Government and Road Safety Scotland today announced the launch of ‘Go Safe! – Ziggy’s Road Safety Mission’, a pioneering new road safety approach aimed at all children from birth to six and their ‘communities’ of parents, carers and educational staff.
Every pre-school child in Scotland will receive a specially created book as part of the new story-based initiative which aims to not only to improve early years road safety education, but also give young children the best possible start to their lifelong learning about keeping safe on and around the road environment.
The road environment still represents the single highest cause of death and injury to young people in Scotland, with 1,474 child casualties on Scotland’s roads in 2009. The new approach aims to reduce child casualties through inspiring the involvement of parents, carers and educators to provide good examples every time they are on or near roads with young children.
As part of the new approach, a total of 106,000 books for home use will be distributed, one for every pre-school child across the country. A new website has been launched for children, parents and educators – https://www.gosafewithziggy.com – and free teaching packs, including the Ziggy series of stories and an interactive CD, are being sent out to all primary schools and pre-school education settings in Scotland from October 2010.
Featuring the colorful ‘Ziggy’ character, a little alien who visits Scotland to learn about road safety, the materials have been developed in line with the Scottish Government’s policy on early intervention and Curriculum for Excellence for each key stage of the early years: 0-3, pre-school and the transition into Primary 1.
To mark the launch of the new approach at an event organised by Road Safety Scotland and Stripe, primary school children and parents from St. Peter’s Primary School in West Dunbartonshire were joined by Scottish actress Julie Wilson Nimmo and Real Radio’s Steve McKenna, who narrates the stories on the website, to take part in a reading from the first book in the series: ‘Ziggy and the Lollipop’.
