The initiative sees the City Police become one of the first police corps to start a learning service with the social goal of preventing accidents in the city through road safety education.
The Safety Education Service (SES) by the City Police has designed the methodology for the learning service ‘Som eduviària’, which got under way today as a pilot project at the Escola Mare de Déu del Roser – Les Planes, in the district of Sarrià – Sant Gervasi.
The learning service is combines learning processes and community service in a single project, where participants train by working on real needs relating to their surroundings with the aim of improving them.
In the case of ‘Som eduviària’, having studied accident causes and consequences, regulations on the circulation of bicycles and personal mobility vehicles and how to teach road sense based on a prevention model and familiarity with safe mobility skills, a group of students in their third or fourth year of secondary school will design and facilitate an online workshop promoting safe and sustainable bike mobility at the children’s road circuit operated by the City Police. The idea is for all children in their last two years at primary school to then put it into practice at their school.
Pupils will also be encouraged to create a teaching resource for children to work on road safety from school. The material produced will be disseminated at their school and at other schools, libraries and community centres.
Besides awareness on the importance of respecting traffic regulations to reduce accidents, students will learn about road sense and the planning and management of projects, bolster their visual expression and/or ICT skills, develop communication skills, carry out teamwork and learn the value of responsibility. In this respect, it is worth noting that most road accidents are caused by infringements or recklessness, rather than by chance.
To this end, a series of training sessions have been designed and scheduled to be given by the SES. These will lay the groundwork for the selected students, in this case in their final year of secondary school, to carry out the project. The work will also count towards their curricular studies.
In this respect, ‘Som eduviària’ responds to the obligation from the Catalan Ministry of Education whereby all secondary schools should carry out community service projects as part of the compulsory curriculum. The duration of the service must be for a minimum of 20 hours.
A partnership has been created with the school for the pilot project, and a collaboration agreement signed by the Barcelona Education Consortium and the municipal Area for Safety and Prevention. The agreement will be valid for the project to be developed over the next four years and offered to any publicly run schools interested.
Once the pilot project is completed and assessed, the educational proposal will be included in the regular SES activity programme ‘The GUB at School’.