Road Safety Scotland (RSS) resources in local authorities: EIR release

Information requested

Information on the uptake of RSS resources in Local Authorities with and without Road Safety Officers.

Response

As you know, Road Safety Scotland (RSS) continues to be funded to maintain and develop learning resources for 3-18 year-olds and, as such, is currently working with a digital agency to audit several of its road safety learning resources, with the intention of replacing or refreshing them. Each project will involve the help and guidance from education professionals, road safety contacts, Road Safety Officers (RSOs), pupils and teachers to ensure the resources developed are fit-for-purpose, linked to Curriculum for Excellence, and engaging in order to meet the needs of today’s pupils. RSS continues to promote its learning resources through various channels, including road safety contacts, PR marketing agencies, Education Scotland, educational journals and attendance at education conferences.

To your point about the uptake of RSS resources in local authorities with and without RSOs. As you know, RSOs are not present in all local authority areas. However, RSS holds and maintains a list of road safety contacts in each local authority area. Although not all contacts are designated solely to road safety education, training and publicity, RSS does encourage them to actively promote the RSS resources in their respective areas.

As all RSS resources are now accessible online, RSS recently carried out an audit of all its online learning resources, and the breakdown for each resource, covering the period July 2022-July 2023 is below.

ROAD SAFETY LEARNING RESOURCE	CfE LEVEL	NUMBER OF VIEWS
Ziggy and Roadstars	Early	48,198
Roadstars	First	27,781
Roadstars	Second	38,925
JRSO	Second	61,686
Your Call	Third and Fourth	38,866
Crash Magnets	Senior Phase	9,073
A2bsafely	Additional Support Needs	1,278

A further breakdown by local authority area shows the total number of users who had accessed the road safety learning resources over the same period:

LOCAL AUTHORITY	TOTAL NUMBER OF USERS
Aberdeen	347
Aberdeenshire	250
Angus	262
Argyll & Bute	0
City of Edinburgh	1166
Clackmannanshire	0
Comhairle nan Eilean Siar	0
Dumfries & Galloway	203
Dundee	110
East Ayrshire	160
East Dunbartonshire	158
East Lothian	0
East Renfrewshire	0
Falkirk	57
Fife	212
Glasgow	1987
Inverclyde	79
Midlothian	0
North Ayrshire	117
North Lanarkshire	446
Orkney Islands	0
Perth & Kinross	307
Renfrewshire	308
Scottish Borders	37
Shetland Islands	0
South Ayrshire	44
South Lanarkshire	501
Stirling	117
The Highland	536
The Moray	230
West Dunbartonshire	231
West Lothian	250

You will be very aware of the Junior Road Safety Officer (JRSO) scheme, which remains very popular throughout the country. The statistics below have been taken from an exercise undertaken by RSS earlier this year, in which local road safety contacts were asked to confirm numbers of JRSO schools in their local areas. Although the JRSO scheme operates across all local authorities in Scotland, unfortunately, not all road safety contacts returned this information. However, you can see from the data below, most local authority areas are accessing the JRSO site. For those JRSO schools who do not have a local RSO, schools can still access the material through the JRSO website or request information and collateral by contacting RSS direct. You may wish to note, work is currently underway to review the JRSO website to ensure the content is relevant to support the JRSO scheme, and to move its content across to the RSS website.

LOCAL AUTHORITY	NUMBER OF JRSO SCHOOLS	TOTAL NUMBER OF USERS TO JRSO SITE BETWEEN 07/2022 TO 07/2023
Aberdeen	0	991
Aberdeenshire	90	585
Angus	0	506
Argyll & Bute	0	0
City of Edinburgh	63	4320
Clackmannanshire	0	110
Comhairle nan Eilean Siar	0	106
Dumfries & Galloway	56	469
Dundee City	0	464
East Ayrshire	25	399
East Dunbartonshire	1	298
East Lothian	39	167
East Renfrewshire	0	0
Falkirk	0	289
Fife	37	999
Glasgow	103	4496
Inverclyde	8	284
Midlothian	31	0
North Ayrshire	40	315
North Lanarkshire	0	877
Orkney Islands	6	71
Perth & Kinross	0	833
Renfrewshire	12	760
Scottish Borders	62	62
Shetland	19	0
South Ayrshire	26	239
South Lanarkshire	0	1604
Stirling	0	154
Highland	102	1116
The Moray	0	416
West Dunbartonshire	32	384
West Lothian	67	662

Please find the link here Reported Road Casualties Scotland 2022 | Transport Scotland, where you will also be able to view information by Police Force and local authority area. Tables 36-42 provide casualties by local authority area.

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