Junior Road Safety Officer Design Workshops

Its official. The future of creativity in this country is safe.

That’s what I have been lucky enough to get a sense of this week, based on the poster design workshops that myself and Lisa have been running on behalf of Hampshire County Council.

Junior Road Safety Officers… or JRSOs to their friends, is a new initiative that has been officially launched this week by the HCC Road Safety team. The idea is that schools in Hampshire have their very own in-house road safety officer that has the responsibility to promote road safety messages to staff and other children through various awareness initiatives and campaigns. Here at The Escape we have been lucky enough to be involved from the outset, helping Hampshire County Council put together the JRSO teacher and student packs, creating direct mail items to promote the scheme and also creating giant cut-outs of the illustrated characters for the launch conferences that have taken place this week.

I know… its a hard job but somebody’s got to do it!

As well as having input on the creative requirements for the scheme, we were asked by Senior Road Safety Officers Julia and Lyndsay to take an active role in the official launch by running poster design workshops over the course of 2 days to show the kids how they could do their own promotion and what the key aspects of good poster design are. Naturally we accepted the honour (or should that be challenge?), spending Tuesday with schools from North Hampshire at the Apollo Hotel in Basingstoke and Thursday at The Rose Bowl with schools from South Hampshire.

I have often thought about whether teaching was an avenue I might like to get involved with in the future and until this week, I wasn’t sure it was quite my bag. I have to say, and I think I speak on behalf of Lisa too, we had a fantastic couple of days and its completely changed my mind. The kids (and teachers) were fantastic throughout. They listened intently to my intro and even looked interested in my pre-prepared Keynote presentation (which I’m sure they were doing just to keep me happy!). The satisfying aspect was that they took on-board what I wanted from them without exception. They really thought about their headlines, the image they wanted to use and what their key message was. Some of the creative ideas and clever headlines were a joy to see and I had great fun going round each table and working with them (it was work… honest!) to get the most out of their half an hour of creativity. At the end of each session we got each child or team to stand up and present their poster and talk through what they had come up with.

The posters created over the 2 days were fantastic. It astonished me how creative the kids could be in such a short period of time. We had ideas for characters that they wanted to become their JRSO school mascot, we had 3 dimensional posters, and just about every other idea possible. Or so I thought. Even up to the last session there was always something new or different the kids came up with. I did wonder if by day 2 we would start to see the same ideas surface but it was impressive to see such a diversity of thinking right till the end.

I hope I/we get the opportunity to do more creative ‘stuff’ with kids. Whether it was their age which made them so receptive I dont know, but what I do know is that when I’m grey (sorry… greyer) and past it, there will always be a fresh crop of creative young talent knocking on the door to take over when my generation and others leave it all behind. Maybe at that point I’ll be the particularly grey (and bald) teacher that’s helping them grow with stories of how we did it in ‘our day’.

We’ll see.