Star rating for schools: Mapping roads around schools by the School Communities IRAP

• In Event: Round-Table Session 3
  In Round-table Session: Child Health Initiative: Safe Journey to School

Proposal

The International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) is a registered charity dedicated to preventing the more than 3,500 road deaths that occur every day worldwide. At the heart of iRAP is a spirit of cooperation. We provide tools and training to help automobile associations, governments, funding agencies, research institutes and other non-government organisations in more than 70 countries make roads safe. Our activities include: inspecting high-risk roads and developing Star Ratings, Safer Roads Investment Plans and Risk Maps; providing training, technology and support that will build and sustain national, regional and local capability; tracking road safety performance so that funding agencies can assess the benefits of their investments.Star Ratings are based on road inspection data and provide a simple and objective measure of the level of safety which is ‘built-in’ to the road for vehicle occupants, motorcyclists, bicyclists and pedestrians. Five-star roads are the safest while one-star roads are the least safe. Importantly, Star Ratings can be completed without reference to detailed crash data, which is often unavailable in low-income and middle-income countries. But every day children are dying or being seriously injured in road crashes as they get to and from their place of education. Sometimes they are killed just yards from the school entrance. We can’t allow these tragedies to continue. Each death and each injury violates a child’s right to an education. This is why Star Rating for Schools Global App has been developed. It’s the first ever systematic evidence-based approach for analysing the risk in roads around schools. This easy-to-use universal application is a low-cost way to support quick interventions that start saving lives and preventing serious injuries from day one. Our vision is of a world where all children travel safely to and from school. In the coming months we will be sharing the stages of our journey towards realising this vision.
This program will be testing over the next 6 months to see that schools and their communities are able to collect the data necessary to map risks for children’s journey to school and take action with the data provided. The data will also be aggregated to share with government and appropriate ministries to address potential risks that require longer term policies. We plan to have results by CIES March 2018 to share.

Author

• Natalie Draisin, FIA Foundation