Actors from the StopWatch Theatre company will be on tour in Allerdale and Copeland in an effort to save young lives.
Cumbria Highways Road Safety Officers are taking StopWatch's 'Road Race' sketch into 14 primary schools in the area.
'The Road Race' is a 45 minute interactive performance workshop devised by StopWatch and performed by three professional actors . It is designed to tie in with the Safer Roads for Cumbria Better Ways to School programme, which tackles sustainable transport issues and improves safety on the journey to school.
During the performance the children and audience will be transported 50 years into the future where they find a world where the journey to school takes almost as long as the school day itself. The congested, polluted, stressed and unfit world they experience is based on worst case scenario predictions, and the time travellers are charged with solving the problems of life in the latter part of the 21st Century, which all seem to come down to traffic.
The children will be encouraged to discover the benefits of walking, cycling and using public transport as a solution to the time travellers problems. The children will make personal action plans to change short journeys they currently make by car which they could safely, with the permission of their parents, make by other means.
By the end of the session the children will:
- Understand that we have a traffic problem
- Realise that we are all part of that problem
- Identify what they can do to help solve the problem
- Be enouraged to promote sustainable transport messages to others
This is a particularly vulnerable road-user group; last year, more than 300 young people under the age of 16 were killed or injured on Cumbria's roads.