Children at Bramley St Peters C of E Primary School in Leeds explain why they chose to make a difference to the issue of car crime
We decided to focus on a local issue because we thought we could make a bigger difference if we tackled a local problem. We did some research on the internet and found out that theft from parked cars was a big problem in Bramley and across West Yorkshire. Over a recent 12 month period there were more than 18,000 thefts from motor vehicles in West Yorkshire.
We invited our local PCSO into school to talk to us about the problem of theft from parked cars in Bramley and asked him lots of questions! We found out that the crime could be prevented if people removed valuable items from their cars.
We thought the most important thing for us to do was to make sure people were aware of how to protect their vehicles so we decided we needed an awareness-raising campaign.
“Pupils’ voices are very important”
Ms Dixon-Dawson
We enlisted the support of Leeds Rhinos Rugby Club’s mascot, Ronnie the Rhino, and designed some car window stickers, using his image, to warn potential thieves that all valuable items had been removed from the car. We also designed leaflets to send home to parents and wrote to Rachel Reeves MP to highlight the issue.
We persuaded our local printing company, Est Display Ltd, to print the car window stickers for us and Leeds Rhinos also agreed for us to hand out information about our campaign to spectators at their match during half-time. We also wrote a song and created a video that we shared with teachers and children from 9 other schools at Leeds Metropolitan University and the story or our car crime awareness-raising campaign even made it into the local paper!
Sign up for the Make a Difference Challenge.