Is this it?

It would be foolish to completely rubbish the newly-announced plans to introduce road safety classes to Transition Year students as any move in that direction is a positive one; but the whole thing does leave you asking ‘is this it?’

The programme, which seems in itself to be a proper attempt at education rather than lip service, is surely going to suffer by the distinct lack of students it will be available to.

Firstly as it is aimed at transition year students it automatically excludes a significant number of schools - a little bit of googling suggests 500 out of around 720 post-primary schools in Ireland run the TY programme; therefore nearly one-third of students are automatically excluded from taking up this class.

Secondly, within those 500 schools running the TY programme many do so on an optional basis, as a result there is only a percentage of the students within these 500 schools that actually do TY rather than go straight to 5th year.

Thirdly teaching this road safety programme is optional, meaning that not all schools doing the TY programme will necessarily pick it up and teach it. It can be assumed that many or most will, as there’s little reason to see why they won’t, but there is still room for it to be ignored by schools.

In the end you have a pretty solid-looking road safety programme that is going to be taught to a very limited number of students; students who have to be in a school that does TY, of a certain disposition to have chosen to do TY and in a situation where the optional programme is actually picked up by their teachers.

Surely the best way to educate young people on road safety is to educate all young people on road safety, or at least the vast majority of them. Of course doing this would require adding the class to the Primary School or Junior Cert. curriculum which is obviously jam packed as it is, however with enough consideration and work there’s certain to be a way to introduce something to all schools that will actually save lives.

Realistically even when that is done you will still fail to reach all young people and arguably the ones that are likely to run the highest risk on our roads are the ones that aren’t going to be in school to hear all the warnings - but that’s only a major problem if you assume that road safety is a one-legged strategy.

So hard luck Mary - top marks for the theory, but I had to fail you on your poor practical work.