6C visited ‘Safety Works!’ to learn all about being safe both at home and in the community. As part of the PSHE curriculum, students were able to receive a high quality experience and learn these essential skills whilst learning outside of the classroom. The curriculum recommends that it is important to learn about citizenship and being able to visit these workshops allowed the children to see the significance of being a sensible and safe member of society, and how to react if they are ever in an unsafe situation.

Whilst at the workshops, the students experienced many situations involving the emergency services. One of the circumstances involved the police and was regarding stealing. It was explained to the children the consequences of what would happen if anybody was caught stealing, this was demonstrated, like all of the scenarios, by role playing. The important message that the children were able to take away from this was that everybody can make mistakes, but if this was a repeat situation, they were able to comprehend how serious it would be.

The children also received information regarding road safety and were able to put this knowledge into practice in the road area of the workshop. This also reiterated what had been covered in school assemblies concerning how to be safe. The children also experienced a workshop on rail line safety and learnt that under no circumstances are they ever to go on a train line.  They also learnt that if there was ever a situation where they thought they might need to; such as dropping their phone on the line or if somebody fell onto the line, what to do in that situation.

Another scenario was about fire in the home; what could start fires and how to avoid this and what steps to take if a fire ever broke out in the home. Finally, the students completed a workshop with St Johns Ambulance about what to do if somebody was unresponsive and learnt how to put somebody in the recovery position. This was in a hospital setting and another great piece of advice they received was, if they were ever scared in a hospital situation to ask two questions: “why am I here?” and “what will make me better?”; this piece of advice seemed to reassure the students, as they can learn how to take some control in what could be a scary situation for them.

Overall there were many opportunities to learn about safety from all of the emergency services and the children not only enjoyed, but took a lot of advice from all of the mock situations.