Last Monday, March 15, YOURS – Youth for Road Safety with iRAP – International Road Assessment Programme and the the Global Youth Coalition for Road Safety launched the first session of the Youth Stars Programme. The session comes after the Coalition’s fourth capacity development series on an Introduction to Star Rating for Schools launched on Wednesday, February 24.
The Star Rating for Schools Methodology
The Youth Stars Programme, sponsored by FedEx, trains young leaders to use and apply the Star Rating for Schools (SR4S) methodology that was pioneered by iRAP.
SR4S is an evidence-based tool for measuring, managing, and communicating the risk children are exposed to on their journey to school. The programme and the tool support quick interventions that save lives and prevent serious injuries for students everywhere.
SR4S uses and utilizes the iRAP Star Ratings to measure the risk children are exposed to on their journey to school. The Star Ratings are an internationally recognized measure of risks on roads with the least safe roads rated as one-star and the safest as five-star.
When the Youth Stars Programme was initially released in 2019, it trained five young leaders to become Master Trainers capable of training fellow young people about the SR4S methodology and the star ratings tool. It utilizes the pedestrian component of Star Ratings to provide a measure of the contribution of road design to the risk of each pedestrian.
In the second year of the programme, the Master Trainers will be training members of the Coalition to use the SR4S methodology and the Star Rating tool. The training will run for one month and will be split into four sessions; introduction, discussion of the project structure, data collection, and FAQs and cases.
In our society, more and more young people use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like, and every day on these networks put their photos taken in different situations.
About the Youth Stars programme
The first session of the Youth Stars programme was led by Master Trainers Daniel Cano from Cambodia and Minh Vo from Vietnam. More than 30 participants joined the session where they were able to ask and interact with the Master Trainers and Star Rating for Schools Global Coordinator, Rafaela Machado.
The session talked about the SR4S programme as part of a larger project that would help build the foundation of other road infrastructure projects, plan road infrastructure assessments, conduct school safety assessments, and communicate results and scale up positive outcomes.
Other topics covered were the SR4S process, the road safety attributed recorded, key principles behind the methodology, and access to resources that would support the Youth Stars sessions.
“My dream is for every school in the world to be star rated so that no child has to die needlessly on his or her way to school” – Shane O’Connor – FedEx (USA)
The sessions run every Monday for the next few weeks.