7 News Belize

Trying to Make Belize’s Road Safer
posted (July 16, 2014)

Today a workshop was held as part of the Road Safety programme, an initiative funded by the Government of Belize and the Caribbean Development Bank to keep the highways safer.  The workshop involved the presentation of a curriculum for primary and secondary schools with participants ranging from teachers to traffic officers. We spoke with Chief Education Officer, Christopher Aird, and UK consultant, Darren Divall, who explained the need for this new curriculum.

Christopher Aird - Chief Education Officer 
"If you examine the existing social studies or HFLE curriculum you will find that there are references to safety in general and some reference to road safety, but the feeling is that there isn't sufficient attention giving to teaching children from an early age about what are safe practices of the road, I think they may have been sometime in the past when teaching children how to walk and ride  on the roads and people how to drive on the roads safely was a routine, but somehow it might have seems to have slipped away and we are looking to restore that. "

Darren Divall - Consultant for Transport Research Laboratory UK
"What are trying to do here is talk to all the stakeholders, review what we've done so far on the project of reviewing the existing curriculum, create the road safety curriculum, and ask if they feel if that is appropriate, if it is realistic, will it be taught by teachers, it is something that they have buy into, but also offer examples of interactive opportunities for teaching on ones that it might be practical as well so we can take them outside of the school environment to deliver some training, particular on pedestrian training or cyclist training. It’s not just about education or just about enforcement or just about engineering. We actually achieve much more when we combine together, so what we're trying to do here is develop an education curriculum, which aligns not only with social studies and HFLE existing curriculum documents, but actually something where it provides a framework for both education for enforcement and engineering, it relates to schools, children and young people."

This workshop was held in Belize City yesterday, and another is scheduled for tomorrow in Belmopan. It’s important to note that in the first 4 months, there was a spike in the number of traffic fatalities, particularly on the Northern Highway.




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