At the Cycle-Smart Foundation we have been educating children about personal cycle safety for 20 years.  The charity was set up in 1998 by Angela Lee, a paediatric trauma nurse, after witnessing countless children admitted into hospital with brain injuries following cycling accidents, and the majority of these children were not wearing helmets.       

Angela campaigned at The Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading where she works to get funding to run programmes locally in schools to raise awareness amongst children of the importance of wearing a cycling helmet. Following the success of this campaign, Angela established The Bicycle Helmet Initiative Trust, now named Cycle-Smart.  Angela still works as a trauma nurse with children and this fuels her to keep pushing the cycle safety message as unfortunately it is still not law for children to wear helmets whilst cycling. We find that the young teen age group are the most difficult to reach as they have  other perceived pressures on them, which have been exacerbated by social media.  Many children have told us that they wish it was law because then it takes the choice away of whether to wear a helmet or not. We have been increasingly alarmed by the growing trend of “wheelies” down the centre white lines of roads.     

There are many charities that work to look after people following devastating head injury, however, we are coming at it from the other angle, working on the prevention rather than the cure. We aim to get our 5 S’s of Cycling Safety into as many schools as possible throughout the year and particularly in deprived areas where the take up of helmet use is often poor. We are able to provide free helmets to the most disadvantaged children and low cost (£6 each) helmets to the other children. We also train a nominated teacher within each school, so that they are able to roll out our programme to future year groups.