LASER Schemes
By John Vallender, LASER Programme Manager at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA)
Learning About Safety by Experiencing Risk (LASER) is a powerful interactive approach to safety education that takes place outside the classroom.
Its purpose is to educate and enable children so that they can begin to take some care of themselves and others in their immediate community.
LASER schemes do this by providing children with opportunities to learn about and practise personal life skills, encouraging them to recognise and deal with the challenges and opportunities they might encounter throughout life, including in the home, when travelling or doing leisure activities.
There are about 200 LASER schemes operating around England. Some run all-year-round at permanent venues, and others are annual events that open for one to four weeks in a variety of locations. The emergency services and local authority staff play a key role in many events.
Schemes run under various names (you might have heard of a Crucial Crew, Junior Citizen or Safety Rangers event, for example).
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) hosts the LASER Forum website — www.lasersafety.org.uk - which gives locations and contact details for permanent and annual schemes across the UK.
An interactive approach to safety education
Wherever possible, LASER favours and uses an interactive “learning by doing” approach.
“Real life” scenarios are at the heart of the schemes and children are guided and supported as they make their way through them.
It is within the scenarios that children develop the skills and confidence to begin to deal with the opportunities and challenges they will be facing as they grow and become more independent.
Typically, children will be learning to: recognise hazards and dangers; use safety advice; make judgments about possible injuries to themselves and others; and summon help quickly when appropriate.
Schemes use scenario mixes based on situations that are familiar to the children. It would be unusual to find a mix that did not contain settings based on or connected to their home, travel, leisure and personal safety.
Let’s consider Home Safety, for example.
Every year in the UK nearly 4,000 people die in accidents in the home and 2.7 million people attend accident and emergency departments seeking treatment. But, because accidents happen behind closed doors in isolated incidents, they rarely attract public and media attention and raising awareness of home safety can therefore be difficult.
Typically, LASER schemes construct realistic rooms in a house including a kitchen, living room, hall and bedroom, plus a garden. Children identify the hazards, discuss how the situation could be made safer, and, where appropriate, are encouraged to make risk judgments and take action.
Leisure scenarios include children practising how to help in situations where something has gone wrong; travel scenarios include key road safety messages; and personal safety scenarios concentrate on “listening to your feelings” and often use “stranger danger”, “dark alley”, and internet chat rooms as a focus.
LASER schemes in action
Across the UK, LASER schemes are run by a number of different bodies, including local authorities, fire services and charities. Even though they run independently of each other, RoSPA believes that it is important for best practice to be recognised and shared between organisations. Working together can also facilitate the development of new ways of delivering accident prevention messages.
To this end, the Society worked with scheme providers to publish a set of LASER Good Practice Guidelines in 2003, and it was then commissioned by the Department of Health to establish an accreditation service for safety centres across England.
The roll-call of schemes that have already achieved LASER Accreditation reveals the diversity of projects across the country and the range of agencies supporting them.
Lifeskills — Learning for Living in Bristol and Flashpoint Lifeskills Centre in Bodmin were the first permanent safety centres to gain accredited status.
The Bristol centre is run by a charity that is supported by a broad range of local and national partners. A supermarket, houses, garage, road, garden, electricity substation, dark alleyway, building site, playground, stream, railway, farm and countryside make up the 10,000 square metre facility, with sound effects bringing the “village” to life.
In Bodmin, groups visiting the North Cornwall District Council-run centre are also given a hands-on approach to understanding the dangers of everyday life through 12 interactive, life-sized stage sets covering road, beach and fire safety, drugs and alcohol awareness, railways, flooding, personal protection, internet safety, crime prevention and making emergency calls. It operates in partnership principally with the local county council, police force and the Environment Agency.
Annual events have also successfully applied for accreditation, including Stockport Council’s Crucial Crew event and West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service’s Leeds Safety Rangers scheme.
Since 1995, more than 22,000 children have attended one of the Stockport events, which bring together the expertise of Greater Manchester Police, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, North West Ambulance Service NHS Trust, British Transport Police, Stockport Primary Care NHS Trust, Stockport Women’s Aid, as well as Stockport Council’s Road Safety, Trading Standards and Children’s & Young People’s teams.
And in Leeds, the Safety Rangers scheme, which is held at four fire stations, also involves a range of agencies - West Yorkshire Police, Leeds City Council, NHS, West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Initiative, British Transport Police, ASDA-Walmart and East North East Homes Leeds.
RoSPA’s approach to risk
It is important to state that RoSPA believes risk-taking to be an important part of life and that children should not be wrapped in cotton wool. Sometimes there will be bumps and bruises.
But it is equally important that people understand the risks they are taking. By assessing the risks involved in a hazardous activity, individuals can make informed choices about their actions. Climbing trees, for example, might be an enjoyable and active way to spend an afternoon, but trees located by roads or above concrete or railings might not be such a good choice.
LASER schemes lay the foundations for such risk awareness that children can build on as they get older.
See www.lasersafety.org.uk for information about LASER schemes.
For details of the LASER Good Practice Guidelines and LASER Accreditation, see www.rospa.com/safetyeducation/laser/ or email John Vallender, RoSPA’s LASER Programme Manager, on jvallender@rospa.com
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RoSPA is a registered charity: Registered Charity No: 207823 Patron: Her Majesty the Queen RoSPA Head Office: Edgbaston Park, 353 Bristol Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham B5 7ST, UK |
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