Push for course funding
LOCAL young driver education courses are in dire need of additional funding, a Bendigo road safety officer says.
Fit to Drive co-ordinator Malcolm Pollitt pushed for the school-age program to be introduced back in 2008.
The half-day workshops service a large part of central Victoria – from Bendigo to Robinvale – visiting secondary schools throughout.
“I knew it was a fantastic program that had the capacity to change kids’ attitudes towards driving,” Mr Pollitt said.
“One issue is the cost of it. For a school with 100 year 11 kids, it will be somewhere around $1800 to run here in Bendigo. We need more financial support to keep programs like these up and running.”
The course uses a variety of fun and interactive workshops to inform students about the complexities of driving.
“Eventually someone says, ‘this is about driving, isn’t it’. The kids really pick it up,” he said. “We don’t just wave our fingers at them saying, ‘don’t do this, don’t do that’, we give them the information and they come to the conclusions.
“Typically from any 100 kids, we would get close to 100 per cent who say they would recommend the workshop to friends their age. I think recent figures in this area indicate the success of the program.”
However, the workshops were only part of what was needed to help prevent teenager fatalities on the roads, Mr Pollitt said.
“You only need very basic car skills to avoid a crash – taking your foot off the accelerator helps, but it’s those perception skills and it’s the attitudes that the drivers take to school their driving.
“The reason for the 120-hour requirement is that research has shown that after this time young drivers will start to pick up the perception skills you only learn by having driven on the road and for a long period of time.
“Not paddocks or off-road complexes either, real roads.’’
