Teachers join campaign to tackle road safety in Westminster

Today Britain’s largest driving school, RED Driving School, visited City of Westminster College in a bid to educate students and teachers on the issues of road safety as part of a campaign to tackle the number of road traffic accidents in the city.

Get Road REDdy, aims to demonstrate the issues of road safety through immersive learning to people living and working in the UK’s worst affected accident blackspots. Westminster falls in the top ten with 1,456 accidents involving young drivers aged between 17 – 24 years old, reported in 2011 alone.

The morning kicked off with a presentation about road safety before teachers were taken out on mock driving tests with a RED instructor to see if their driving skills were still up to scratch. Whilst teachers were out being tested, pupils competed in a road safety quiz based on theory test questions to see just how much they knew about the rules of the road.

Anita Kaur a Business Lecturer at the college who under took a mini mock driving test, failing on her parallel parking says, “I failed my mock test but that’s ok, as my lesson with the instructor made me aware that even though I have been driving for four years, you can easily fall into bad habits.”

Sadia Khan, the RED instructor from London, took the teachers on their mock tests said, “Learning to start, stop and park a car is no longer enough to become a qualified driver, pupils now have to get high marks in a theory test and pass both a hazard perception and their practical test too.

“These tests have only been introduced within the last twenty years meaning many drivers will not have had to learn stopping distances and so on to pass their test. We therefore want to encourage them to join us so we can educate people on road safety.”