Peace of mind for parents knowing that their children are safer while travelling in vehicles.

UK Road Safety Ltd is constantly looking at ways that it can bring driver education and awareness into new areas.  For some time now several local councils have offered parents the opportunity to have their driving assessed by a DSA (Driving Standards Agency) Approved Driving Instructor for one hour, UK Road Safety don’t think that this goes anything like far enough as this only offers the chance of an assessment and doesn’t go into any form of further practical training or the opportunity to discuss other child road safety issues such as the correct purchase and fitment of child seats in an open format.

OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) sets out certain safety standards in its document for Child Minders.  Safety Standard 6 states certain criteria for Child Minders who are required to drive children around as part of their duties, however the criteria is extremely basic and only covers 3 basic points, these are;

There is no mention of practical driving assessments or driver training.  What is worse is that for all other categories of child carers such as Nannies and Au Pairs there are no regulations or advice relating to the risks of driving children in a car.

UK Road Safety Ltd has for some time considered that these standards do not go far enough.  Driving is generally the riskiest activity that you can do as an adult and each year according to RAGB (Road Accidents Great Britain 2003) around 12,500 children aged 0-15 are injured travelling in a car, around 865 are killed or seriously injured and around 68 are killed, this level of death and injury of young car passengers is totally unacceptable.  It is important to note that these figures do not show any indication of the number of near miss incidents that happen everyday that compromise the child’s safety in the car.  

It would be safe to say that the majority of these injuries and deaths are caused due to driver error.

For this reason UK Road Safety has designed a programme to address the issues surrounding advice for anyone who during the course of their employment is required to drive children around.  This advice also extends to parents, grandparents and indeed anyone who may drive children around.

Most parents of children who require some type of care for their children will go to great lengths to ensure that certain relevant checks are made on an individual prior to engaging their services for child care, these checks will include;

Parents and employers do not check things like driving experience and qualifications, understanding of UK driving or UK driving familiarisation.  It is wrongly assumed that if you have a licence you are a competent driver.  Most of these people wouldn’t let a stranger drive their personal car, yet they are happy to let someone who is relatively unknown drive their children around.

It is not enough to have just passed the standard DSA Driving Test.  Most child carers are in the 17 – 24 year age group and therefore ignoring all other relevant risk factors are in the highest risk group for driving.  As this age group will be relatively new to driving they may not have experienced travelling with children in the car and the distraction that they can cause, they may not have had any experience of the correct fitment of a child seat or restraint, when to change a child seat for a booster seat, they may not have experienced a breakdown on the motorway by themselves let alone a breakdown when children are in the car.  The UK Road Safety Chauffeur Les Enfants course has been designed to address all of these issues and more

Our programme is extensive in it’s content and broadly covers the following area’s.