What can teachers do…
To reduce teenage road death and trauma?
Enquire about teaching BRAKE in your school
BRAKE is a simple, inexpensive classroom program targeted at year eleven students in public and private schools.
BRAKE shapes attitudes towards road risk for young Australians.
If you would like your school to participate, please fill in the form below for further information about the course. We will also provide you with log-in details to our online course management portal, BOS.
With BOS, you can create classes, upload student details and pay for the courses. You also use BOS to stream the BRAKE Courseware.
You can register your interest as either a teacher or a school administrator. Please also select your school from the list.
We will contact you by email shortly after you register your interest.
Register your school now
all Teenagers want to be good drivers.
We need to help them know how.
Your students are three (3) times more likely than you to die or be injured in a road crash. You can help.
Here is a graph showing the Queensland Casualty Crash Involvement illustrating the dangers “P-Plate” drivers face.
Their first 18 months are especially critical.
The graph is from Queensland’s Department of Transport and Main Roads and the University of Queensland’s CARRS-Q road-safety research centre.
An underlying cause for these statistics is that teenagers lack the ability to assess risk accurately.
The BRAKE Program gives teenagers evidence-based tools to appreciate their unique exposure to risk and the consequences of under-estimating it.
What is BRAKE?
The BRAKE Driver Awareness program has been taken by over 60,000 Queensland students in more than 150 public and private schools, in classes taught by over 500 teachers.
The six-part BRAKE program is led by qualified high school teachers to year eleven students in a school environment, seated with their peers. This “knowledge gained through education” strategy has proven internationally to be more resilient and effective in changing long-term behaviour.
The award-winning BRAKE Program has been developed by road safety experts and educational specialists. It provides students with the facts about “risks and their consequences” they’ll face as novice road users.
BRAKE teaches students the concepts and vocabulary necessary to understand and discuss the risks they will face while gaining the experience to become safe road users.
This year, BRAKE has wholly updated our multi-media courseware. It is easier to teach and is delivered online.
This initiative is supported by funding from the Queensland Government’s Community Road Safety Grants scheme.
BRAKE is unlike one-off advertising campaigns that seek to shock; or one-off events that can frighten but not change long-term behaviour. BRAKE is not advanced driving training, which international research shows has a neutral to adverse effect on novice driver safety outcomes over time.
Research on cognitive development in teenagers shows that the teenage brain is still very much a work-in-progress.
The pre-frontal cortex responsible for decision making and risk assessment is the last brain area to develop, often leading to ill-considered teenage behaviour.
The pre-frontal cortex is not fully developed until around age 25. Worse, while most adults can attend to seven simultaneous sensory inputs, the teenage brain barely manages four.
This has safety consequences.
Teenagers also have a natural “optimism bias”, which causes them to overestimate their maturity and abilities.
Together these factors are a root cause for the awful casualty statistics shown in the graph above.
Price now reduced to $20*
BRAKE Driver Awareness Limited, as Trustee for the BRAKE Charitable Trust, was awarded government funding support in a competitive tender process in 2022.
This initiative is supported by funding from the Queensland Government’s Community Road Safety Grants scheme.
As a registered charity and a not-for-profit organisation, BRAKE seeks to make our innovative, award-winning courseware widely available to schools throughout Queensland.
Our new funding has allowed us to significantly reduce the cost per student from $50 to just $20*.
Schools have a variety of methods of sourcing funds for the BRAKE program*. Direct payments from parents is a common way. Many schools have approached community organisations, service clubs, businesses or local councils for funding.
Other schools have successfully applied for Government grants to fund the classes.
* BRAKE also offers a limited number of further discounts to ensure equality of access to the program.
Student Completion Survey Results
The data for this survey is from students who completed the BRAKE Driver Awareness course.
Students filled out survey forms by hand at the end of the course. The data shows that at the start of the BRAKE program, there was limited interest in the course.
However, by the end of the course, student’s final perceptions about BRAKE became strongly positive.
Interestingly, students not only thought that the course would be helpful to others, but 80% also expressed a belief that the course taught them about safe, responsible driving and passenger responsibility.
Only 7% had negative opinions about the knowledge the course provided to help them become “a safe driver in the future”.
REMEMBER – CRASHES HAVE CONSEQUENCES
One of the most dreaded tasks our police officers face is the “Twelve O’clock knock”.
This is where police have to tell anxious parents that their teenage son or daughter has been killed or badly injured in a road crash.
It is a devastating experience for all concerned.
The trauma of a crash involving teenagers’ death or injury affects a wide circle of people: parents, siblings, relations, school friends and the wider community.
Survivors of such crashes are often severely affected for many years.
It is important to remember that apart from the personal trauma for those involved in a crash, there is also a legal responsibility for the breaking of laws, and financial liability for the damage caused to vehicles and property. There are often hefty fines for those who violate road laws, even imprisonment in severe cases.
A crash is not a trivial thing. Its emotional, psychological and legal effects can extend for months or years.