Keeping the North West safe and sound

 by Martin Belam, 8 September 2006

Following my post the other week about the National Rail network's "No Messin'" campaign, one of the team behind another child safety campaign got in touch with me. "Safe and Sound" is a CD-ROM distributed to schools in the North West of England, which features the adventures of Safe and Sound, the top under-12's sound system in the North West.

Safe and Sound road safety advice

I really liked the approach they'd taken - for example encouraging low level nuisance behaviour like changing the desktop picture on your parent's PC, whilst slyly slipping in the road safety messages along the way.

Safe and Sound desktops

Safe and Sound game

Mind you, I couldn't help feel slightly disgruntled and old man-ish. Kids these days get a chance to win decks whilst learning about road safety - if I remember correctly when I was at school I just got a lecture from a man in a squirrel costume.

Tufty the Squirrel badge

And I was just a bit too young to experience Doctor Who doing road safety in the 70s Splink! campaign.

Jon Pertwee in Splink!

They'll have to hope that kids are quite careful typing in the URL though - add a couple of hyphens and at safe-and-sound.org.uk there is another safety campaign about children - but one that looks a lot less appealing.

The other safe and sound campaign

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