Safe Drive Stay Alive is a road safety campaign run by Thames Valley Police which aims to reduce the number of road casualties among young people. It is targeted at teenagers aged between 16 and 18, who may be new drivers or about to learn. Chief Inspector Henry Parsons, head of Roads Policing for
Thames Valley Police, explains: “Road death is the biggest killer of young people in the UK. For every tragic death, 10 more young people suffer serious and often life-changing injuries. Each crash is a human tragedy from which families and friends never truly recover. Safe Drive Stay Alive highlights the choices that young people make that really are the difference between staying alive or becoming another tragedy.” Sibford sixth formers were among some of the many young people who attended the course which was held at the Kings Centre in Oxford. Year 12 pupil Richard Holdcoft (pictured above) shares the experience.
In November we went on a driving awareness course. The course was held in Oxford and the drive there was pleasant enough, with lots of joking about. We arrived and were guided towards the main hall. I had expected the hall to be fairly small with only enough room for our school and maybe one more, but it was colossal. The whole set up was highly professional with large projectors and a high tech sound system.
The show began with a video
showing a group of young people on a night out whose car is involved in a collision. This video was going to be central to the overall message of the show. After a few minutes the video faded out and was replaced with the emblem of the show. A policeman then walked up to the lectern and began to talk about his experiences of dealing with car crashes. What was very evident in what he said was that he was always very saddened at a fatality because of the procedures he had to go through with the families. He was clearly touched by what he had seen. After the policeman, a fireman
walked out and gave his account of car crashes he has been to. Unlike the policemen however, he went into graphic detail about the smells of a car crash.
The manner in which he described what he could smell made it feel all the more real. Smell is something we take for granted and as such bringing it to the
18 / The Sibfordian
foreground in this way brought what he was saying into sharp focus.
The video then continued before again stopping, and this time a member of the ambulance crew walked onto the stage. He gave another very personal and moving account of being at the scene of a collision and the things he had had to do in order to try and save life.
The inclusion of personal accounts from the emergency services involved gave a fantastic perspective of what it is like for them to have to deal with accidents. For me, however, the most
moving part was when a disabled girl came onto the stage. We had already learned from her mother about the person she was before the crash happened. We then watched as she struggled to make it onto the stage and could clearly see she was having great difficulty walking. She began to talk and her speech was slurred and broken ... she sounded like someone who had had part of her tongue removed. When she finished speaking she got the largest applause out of anyone who had been on the stage. Quite rightly so. Her struggle was a real wake up call to all of us.
This course really brought the
point home to us all about how things can go so badly wrong when you’re driving. The journey home was nowhere near as joyful.
D
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