Travel Together Safely
A guide for adults supporting young people with complex additional support needs to learn road safety skills.
Getting started with road safety learning
As an adult supporting a young person with complex additional support needs (ASN), you are their travel companion and can support and guide them.
The support you give will vary depending on the young person. It may be providing them with an experience of road safety aspects through exploration and describing their surroundings, providing 1:1 support, or giving them more independence at certain times throughout their learning journey.
Each young person’s profile will be different, and you know them best. Working together with all adults involved in their lives will support a collaborative approach to learning effective road safety skills to aid their long-term health, wellbeing, and safety.
This guide will take you through important elements of road safety, which you can then use to help the young person understand how to stay safe while walking and travelling in the community. Visual aids are included in the long form PDF guide provided, to support further with learning.
Throughout the guide, you will be referred to as the ‘travel companion’ and the young person with complex ASN is referred to as the ‘learner’.
Section 1: Stop, Look, Listen, Think
This section of the guide has some useful visual aids for ‘Stop, Look, Listen, Think’. You can use them to help the learner understand what each part of the sequence means.
Section 2: Leaving the house
As the travel companion, you will be teaching the learner to travel sensibly with all necessary equipment safely packed. In this section, there are some ideas on what to take, and how to prepare, when going outside on a journey.
Section 3: Using the pavement
This section has some ideas on what to take, and how to prepare, when going outside on a journey. Depending on the learner, they may be able to collect and pack the items themselves.
Section 4: Traffic awareness
This section explains what traffic is and helps teach the learner basic parts of vehicles and how traffic works to help them build awareness of their surroundings and develop essential road safety skills.
Section 5: Types of crossings
Teaching the learner the correct sequence of steps is essential to them using crossings safely. Understanding the different kinds of crossings will help you to support the learner in recognising and using them correctly.