A free website to help road safety practitioners evaluate their education,
training and publicity activities was launched by the Royal Society for the
Prevention of Accidents and the Department for Transport.

At the heart of the Road Safety Evaluation website is E-valu-it - an
interactive tool that helps practitioners define exactly what they are doing
and why and design and carry out their evaluation. It also promotes the
publication and sharing of results.

The site also includes background information and guidance about evaluation.

It was developed after it was found that, while evaluation of road safety
engineering was already an established discipline, road safety practitioners
faced difficulties in evaluating their education, training and publicity (ETP)
activities.

Mike Penning, road safety minister, said: In the current economic climate
everyone wants to make sure they are spending taxpayers money in the most
effective way. To do that it is vital organisations can accurately evaluate all
activities - whether they are road engineering measures or education campaigns.

This new website will allow local authorities to assess the value of education,
training and publicity activities, which will in turn help them to design high
quality schemes and target them where they will have the most impact. I am
delighted that we have been able to work with RoSPA to develop this invaluable
tool and I hope it will be widely used by road safety practitioners.

Kevin Clinton, RoSPAs head of road safety, said: It is recognised that it is
much harder to evaluate road safety ETP than road safety engineering. But it is
more important than ever that we are able to demonstrate the effectiveness of
what we do. The sharing of such information is also important - road safety
practitioners have much to learn from each other about interventions that have
worked and also those that have been less successful.

E-valu-it helps practitioners plan, carry out and report the results of ETP
evaluations. The system produces bespoke recommendations for the type of
evaluation that could be conducted based on the answers given to a series of
questions. It can be used for interventions that are planned, in progress or
have already taken place.

A major strength of the system is that it transfers all the generated results
into an evaluation report template. Users can then add to the template
throughout their evaluation, producing a professional report at the end of the
process.

To enable knowledge to be shared and good work promoted, E-valu-it encourages
users to publish their final reports on www.roadsafetyevaluation.com, as well
as on the Road Safety Knowledge Centre website and their own organisations
websites.

Twelve regional workshops, involving the DfT, RoSPA and local authorities
across Britain, are being held as part of the websites development. Road Safety
Evaluation is also being supported by 12 regional champions who can explain to
potential users the benefits of using E-valu-it.

The website is free to use, and there is no limit on the number of people who
can sign up from any one organisation.

More info

AplusA-online.de - Source: Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents