Safe System Training and Capacity Building - Road Safety Knowledge Centre

Which Safe System Operators does your case study cover?

Standards and training
Investment and innovation
Education and communications

Please explain how this case study relates to the key principles of the Safe System?

Scotland's Road Safety Framework to 2030 (RSF2030) embeds the Safe System approach to road safety. The framework sets out a vision for Scotland to have the best road safety performance in the world by 2030 and an ambitious long term goal where no one is seriously injured or killed on our roads by 2050. The framework is backed up by 4 national and a full suite of mode and user specific casualty reduction targets due for delivery by 2030.

However, despite the framework adopting the Safe System approach, we recognised that there is still a real lack of knowledge amongst road safety partners when it comes to Safe System delivery.

What did you seek to achieve and how did you go about it?

In order to achieve our clear ambition to have ‘the best road safety performance in the world’, we recognised that such an extensive ambition required significant and sustained effort to develop and embed practice that is world leading.

This cannot be limited to a few key policy makers, or a handful of experts within Transport Scotland; it demands an apprehension of how the system delivers the safest journeys to all road users, a perspective which is shared and articulated by elected officials, policymakers, engineers, maintenance crews, educationalists, and marketeers.

By investing in the people of Scotland, we set out to ensure that the Safe System is being implemented across the entire Scottish system of road network operators, their supply chains, and stakeholders.

Transport Scotland worked with Agilysis to implement this project, with phase 1 being delivered over 2023/24 and phase 2 being delivered over 2024/25. What was delivered in each of the phases, is detailed below:

Phase 1:

e-Learning Primer– This e-learning primer has been created to develop stakeholders understanding of Safe System delivery.
Cultural Maturity Playbook –This Playbook contains over 40 case studies on culture changes used within organisations. The aim of this Playbook is to enhance the progression of Safe System culture within respective partner organisations.
Data Roadmap – Various workshops were held with partners which helped in developing a data audit. This informed the creation of a Data Roadmap, which aims to enhance performance data and analytical capacity. A Data Workshop will soon be created between Transport Scotland and partners to progress this workstream.
Training Course– Two sessions of the two day Safe System Training were delivered to Transport Scotland staff in 2023.

Phase 2:

Delivery of Safe System Foundation Training (two-day in person to 240 delegates)
Safe System Principles training (online) (300 delegates)
Safe System Manual Coordination and Creation
Safe System Cultural Maturity survey to identified partners

What were your aims and objectives?

Phase 1:

Aims:

Investing in Safe System Culture so that it is an approach adopted across the country and becomes what Scotland ‘does’ as established practice.
Creating a suite of training resources tailored to the needs of those involved in road safety in Scotland.
Facilitating enhanced performance and analysis by working with the analytical teams to understand how data improvements can be made.
Developing a Safe System manual, working with international experts to provide a guidebook for Scottish practitioners.

Objectives:

Exploration of the current road safety culture, roles, and vocabulary used within Scottish road safety stakeholder organisations.
Deployment and analysis of the Safe System cultural maturity tool across Scottish road safety stakeholder organisations.
Creation of a Safe System Cultural Maturity playbook for use by organisational leaders, providing guidance as to how Safe System readiness can mature within road safety organisations.
Identification of national and international expertise to help shape development.
Creation of a primer unit to start engaging partner agencies with material.
Creation of Safe System Foundational materials, appropriate to all professionals working in highways.
Delivery of a workshop to explore current data architecture, usages, data needs and gaps in relation to the Safe System.
Completion of a scoping/mapping exercise and expert panel(s) to identify leading practice and the potential route for development in relation to Safe System data.
Creation of a roadmap for enhancing performance data and analytical capacity.
Delivery of expert workshop(s) to create a comprehensive outline for a Safe System manual.
Exploration of relevant technologies to ensure sustainable future development and updates of the Safe System manual.

Phase 2

Aims:

Providing a programme of Safe System training across Transport Scotland and partners.
Exploring the Safe System Culture within Transport Scotland’s operating companies, providing insights as to how they can mature and ensure that the Safe System is delivered as established practice.
The creation of a Safe System manual, working with international experts to provide a guidebook for Scottish practitioners.

Objectives:

Rolling out 8 sessions of the two-day Safe System Foundation course to a wide range of Scottish road safety stakeholders, delivering in-person across the country.
Delivering 10 sessions the Safe System Principles training course virtually.
Adapting the Cultural Maturity survey to ensure it is applicable for Scottish partners and stakeholders, analysing the results and producing a summary output to help them access the Safe System Culture Playbook and assist them with Safe System readiness.
Creation of an editorial board and building and hosting an online platform for the Safe System manual, leading on dissemination and engagement, webinars and conferences to ensure its use.
Creation of Safe System Manual content, through procuring international expert input, curating and consulting on content.

Which other stakeholders and partners were involved?

Engagement took place with a wide range of stakeholders that govern the RSF2030. Stakeholders were in attendance at a variety of workshops where we explored current data architecture, usages, data needs and gaps in relation to the Safe System.

We will be rolling out the Safe System training to: Road Safety Practitioners, Road Safety Engineers, Road Safety Officers, Heads of Roads, Design Managers etc. The half day foundation course will target: Planners, Active Travel, Policymakers, Maintenance, Educationalists, Marketeers etc. This will be from a variety of organisations including the 33 roads authorities, Police Scotland, Scottish Ambulance Service, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and all governing organisations of the framework such as: RoSPA, Cycling Scotland, Living Streets, Public Health Scotland, to name a few.

How are you measuring/did you measure the effectiveness of what you delivered? What results did you achieve?

Each Phase of the project is evaluated by an independent accredited Evaluator. This is being carried out by Dr Liz Box, ECM Research Solutions, and the evaluation for phase 1 is published on our website: Phase 1 Evaluation.

The findings from the phase 1 process evaluation underscore the need for continued efforts and next steps to build on the project’s successes and address the identified challenges. One of the key recommendations was the importance of ongoing commitment and investment in people and processes. The work in phase 1 set a strong foundation, but continued support and resources will be crucial for maintaining momentum and achieving long-term success.

Another critical recommendation was the need to enhance understanding of Safe System terminology and practical implementation. While the project clearly made significant strides in promoting the Safe System approach, there is still a need for further education and training to ensure that these principles are fully understood and effectively applied across the sector. Future work should focus on providing clear guidance and practical examples to help practitioners translate Safe System concepts into actionable strategies.

The outcomes from the Phase 1 evaluation helped inform our approach and assisted us in the creation of the foundations for Phase 2.

What challenges did you encounter on the way?

The rolling out of the training and development of the Safe System manual is extremely sought after by road safety partners, which has been encouraging. However, in order to get to this stage, many workstreams were undertaking to inform this, such as data workshops with partners in attendance and asking all partners to complete a cultural maturity survey, to gauge Safe System understanding of respective individuals in partner organisations.

While Project Managers continuously chased this and held calls and meetings to emphasise the importance, the level of engagement was underwhelming. A key aspect of the survey was to get many individual responses as opposed to one response on behalf of the whole organisation. The reason for the lack of responses may be down to: not wanting to complete one individually, not having time due to a busy workload, not understanding the importance their contribution has to the wider project or not understanding the project or concept itself.

What advice would you give to other organisations seeking to deliver something similar?

This project has incurred a significant investment from Transport Scotland and Scotland is the first country in the UK to deliver this free of charge. First of all, financing the project has to be taken into consideration. We want to show that we are the most knowledgeable country that we possibly can be and after the national roll out of the training if we start to see the benefits of the overall road safety delivery, then it will be a great investment.

Strong political leadership is fundamental to the roll out of this project. Road Safety is seen as an absolute priority for the Scottish Government and this project is just one of the many initiatives that Transport Scotland is undertaking to improve safety on our road network and ultimately achieve our ambitious casualty reduction targets contained in our RSF2030.

Communication & engagement is a key aspect to this project. We informed partners of this project via our three tiered governance structure, at meetings of joint interest, 121 meetings etc. Investment is one thing but you have to educate partners on what you are doing, why it’s important, how it impacts them and ultimately bring them on the journey with you.

Monitoring and evaluation is fundamental to everything we do in Transport Scotland, whether it be in policy development or projects. While we regularly review this work internally, the project is independently evaluated after each phase.

What are the next steps for you and your partners in relation to this initiative?

Currently, we are focused on fully delivering phase two of this project, which is rolling out Safe System training to over 500 road safety partners, development of the Safe System Manual, amongst other workstreams.

Once phase 2 has concluded, we will collectively review the phase 2 evaluation, to assess the effectiveness of the project.

We will then focus on rolling out the manual to ensure that all deliver partners are aware of this and more importantly, are delivering this on their network.

The Cultural Maturity Playbook is a great piece of work and we will focus on advertising this more, with the aim to enhance the progression of Safe System culture within respective partner organisations, and long-term, creating Scotland specific case studies.

We will set up a delivery group to discuss and implement the findings from the Data Roadmap.

We will also work with partners to assess how the training went and how it was received. Should there be further interest in this, whether it be delivering it to people wider in their organisation, those new to roles etc, we will gauge the interest and discuss this with our Road Safety Governance group before considering the continuation of this training.

Project information