Enhanced STEM event at a primary school

At A-one+ we believe that by increasing the understanding of what we do on the motorways and trunk roads, we promote a common goal of safer roads for our roadworkers, for our communities, including students, staff, parents/carers, and for road users.

In partnership with Highways England we spent a day with 462 children at Seven Hills Primary School in Morley Leeds to raise awareness of what we do to keep the trunk road network safe. The event was held in support of Road Safety Week with a particular focus on incident management and road gritting – a seasonal topic.

During the day we held a morning assembly with the school, inducting them onto our team to keep the roads safe, and then proceeded to take them on a typical working day in keeping our roads open.

We began by showing the children an incident where a bridge over the strategic road network had been struck by an over-height load, and how computers, maths and science helps us to react to incidents.

The children were then shown the specialist vehicles we use to react to incidents on the roads. The students were shown the internal workings of our forward command vehicle and the complexity of keeping the roads free of ice using our fleet of gritters.

At the end of the day, we took the opportunity to stay behind and talk to parents and carers who would be aware of our operations but would not necessarily have had a chance to understand in detail what we do.