Developing a Scaffolded, Structured Approach to Road Safety Education in Schools

Abstract

Scaffolding is a well-established approach to education to maximise student learning outcomes. The premise of this paper is that there is a need for formal, scaffolded road safety education (RSE) which can be delivered in schools in Australasia. This paper supports the education system as being expert in matching human growth and developing scaffolds on which to build learning stages and presents arguments to show that an RSE scaffold can and should be drawn up. Schools can provide a structured in-class and real world learning experiences within that scaffold, which, with suitable communication, can be backed up by the home and the broader community. An integrated RSE scaffold across primary through secondary schooling is currently lacking in Australasia, but could be readily integrated in current school curricula. This paper calls for such developments and welcomes further debate and implementation of next steps to achieve this.