The Big Society is the government’s high profile initiative. But after my experiences this week I feel that David Cameron has a lot more work to do internally, because it seems to lack support from his own Government departments.
This week E-Training World launched its latest free- to-use e-learning system called ‘Road Safety for Kids’.
We, as a company, have a policy of developing at least one product per year that we don’t make any money from, which is our way of putting something back into society. I have been a road safety professional for 20 years, I champion road safety causes and am very passionate about it. This is why I’ve always committed to make sure that any business that I run will always allocate some of its time and resource to help save lives.
If this activity saves at least one person from the misery of a road accident, that makes it worthwhile. Now surely that is the very essence of what is meant by the Big Society – an ethic that ourselves and other road safety organisations have been doing for many years, well before the politicians decided to ‘invent’ the idea.
So, to help us promote our new ‘Road Safety for Kids’ programme we contacted a number of organisations and I have to say the response was fantastic. The feedback was that people were thrilled that we’d produced a free resource, that they admired our commitment to saving lives and that they were grateful to companies like ours who were prepared to take action.
The only exception was the response from the Department for Transport, who sent us the email below:
“There is already a free to use suite of curriculum based road safety education materials for 3-16 year olds, their teachers and parents (along with printed materials) available to schools, which is our THINK! Education resource. As you’ve used the education in-box I would assume you’ve already seen these.”
Campaign Manager
Department for Transport
It appears that the Department for Transport believes that only education materials developed by them are worth promoting. Well if this is the case, there won’t be much road safety education for children or even adults with all the budget cuts!
We were not looking for praise or a pat on the back. Just a commitment from the Department of Transport to include our free programme in any promotions they do to help kids. What harm can another programme aimed at reducing child road casualties do?
As a result, E-Training World has now written to the Prime Minister. Let’s hope he supports the Big Society idea and encourages his departments to change their attitude as they are not the only people who have good ideas.
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