In March 2022, a set of three royal decrees (primary, until 12 years of age; compulsory secondary, until 16 years of age; and secondary higher education) with nation-wide effect on the modernisation of the entire curricula at schools came into effect. It is regarded as a large step forward in terms of sustainable mobility education in Spain.
The new curricula provide an additional level of detail on the specific content regarding safe mobility education that all students must learn. More importantly, the learnings will be assessed at the end of each school year, as is already the case for core subjects as mathematics or geography.
The traffic safety and sustainable mobility objective in the new curricula for primary education is to “develop daily habits of healthy autonomous active mobility, promoting road education and respectful attitudes that affect the prevention of traffic collisions”.
For the secondary education’s curricula, the objectives are part of the learning goal to have an efficient and sustainable interaction with the environment, and include “respect for road rules in daily active traffic for a safe, healthy and sustainable mobility”, as well as “the practice of cycling as a regular means of transport”.
Traffic education is not new in Spain. The first Spanish road traffic code of 1934 already stated that “teachers from all schools and colleges, both official and private, must teach their pupils the basic traffic rules and the need to rigorously observe them; warning them of the serious dangers they can be exposed to when playing on the carriageway of open roads, running carelessly out of education centres, jumping onto the rear cargo area of vehicles or on tram bumpers…”.
Until now, road safety was a “cross-cutting” subject that was normally embedded in other subjects. However, to a large extent, it was up to each school – or even to each individual teacher – to invest more or fewer resources in education on safe mobility.
Main advances of the new curricula
There are three main advancements in the 2022 curricula. The first change alters the playing field for providers of safe mobility education. Previously, informal road safety education helped bridge a gap between what the school (or the teacher) was capable of teaching and the real situations in traffic that a child would encounter in their daily life. However, following the enactment of the new legal decrees, every provider of safe mobility education from outside the schools will have to adjust their programmes, and find new roles as they will no longer merely fill gaps, but instead will have to support, complement and reinforce the central role of schools and teachers.
The decrees change the “anything is better than nothing” approach to “it must enrich and anchor what has already been taught at schools by teachers”. This applies not only to safe mobility foundations such as Fundación MAPFRE, but also traffic safety education units in local police agencies as well as all other stakeholders that have been supporting safe and sustainable education until now.
The second main change is that the safe mobility content will become part of the formal evaluation. This means that all children and youngsters will benefit from the education, not only those that were lucky enough to gain particular knowledge, skills and practice in after-school or voluntary activities offered by foundations or police.
The third major change is the connection between mobility and sustainability issues, health matters and social and gender equity needs. These important aspects were previously often disregarded in many road safety education activities, as the main or sole focus was the prevention of traffic injuries.
The new Spanish educational regulations on safe mobility were presented during the 2022 European Traffic Education Seminar.