Our Safeside centres are great centres of learning with a variety of programmes and activities designed to teach young people various skills to keep them safe, secure and enhance their life skills.
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Our mission
Our mission is to use education to help with making West Midlands safer as an integral part of West Midlands Fire Service. Our ethos at Safeside is ‘learning about safety by experiencing risk’, in other words, experiential learning. For example, our visitors may learn about: –
• Road safety by using a real crossing
• Fire safety by discovering a fire
• Experience of making an emergency call
• Water safety by role-playing responses to a drowning
• Financial safety by using a working cash machine
• Personal safety by witnessing anti-social behaviour and acting to reduce risk
• The work of firefighters, and undertaking safety checks within the home
So what exactly is Safeside?
Our Safeside centres in Eastside and Handsworth provide experiential learning on safety issues for children, young people and adults, designed and maintained to complement the current PSHE curriculum.
Our Eastside centre features our immersive full-size indoor safety village. Many different scenarios make up our village including a bank, house, road, shop, police station, and canal. It allows children to learn about real dangers, within a safe and controlled environment.
Safeside at Handsworth is on the grounds of a working fire station and is home to our home safety facility including fire safety, focusing mainly on fire safety and the work of the fire service in the community.
Our programmes
Our two Safeside centres offer a variety of different programmes for young people’s education. Here is a list of some of the programmes we offer, click any one of them to find out more or book your places today!
All Safeside programmes recognise that individuals learn in different ways.
Discussion through open questions that stimulate independent thought and problem-solving is very important.
Each learning point is addressed through visual, auditory or kinaesthetic means. For example, visitors will see and discuss choosing safe routes to walk home, but will also experience an unsafe route including sounds and darkness.
Our programmes address the real issues for the user group as shown by the statistics, rather than the public perception of risk, which is sometimes inaccurate. The issues faced by primary school children about to move to secondary school are very different, for example, to those important for the parents and carers of the under fives.
In general, we book tours for organised groups such as schools, nurseries, youth or special needs groups.
Eastside
- Junior Citizen Programme
- Lifeskills
- NGAGE
- Safestart
- YOYO
- SEN (Special Educational Needs)
Handsworth
- Bright Sparks
- FireCrew and FireCrew Plus
How to find us
Eastside
Safeside at Eastside, 101 Vauxhall Road, Birmingham, West Midlands, B7 4HW
Handsworth
Safeside at Handsworth, Handsworth Community Fire Station, 41 Rookery Road, Birmingham, West Midlands B21 9QU
For just BUS travel you can use the ‘Class Pass’ service to book discount travel within the West Midlands – for details see their website or email classpass@nationalexpress.com
For Bus, Train and Metro travel there is another ‘Class Pass’ scheme for discounted public transport, again in the West Midlands. For details on this scheme visit their website or you can call 0345 303 6760
