Rail safety education does not reach every child who needs it. That is not a failing of the curriculum or the teachers, it is simply a gap that exists, and one that the rail industry is in a position to help close.
That is what drew COMET to the Rail Safe Friendly programme. In the year since we joined, the programme reached 4,839 young people across 10 schools on our behalf. We are sharing that not because it is a milestone worth announcing, but because those numbers represent something specific: children who now understand the railway as an environment that demands respect, before they ever have reason to find out the hard way.
What Rail Safe Friendly does
Rail Safe Friendly exists to get rail safety education into every school in the UK. The programme works through the Learn Live broadcast platform, delivering age-appropriate safety content directly into classrooms at no cost to schools. The goal is simple: make sure that every child in the country understands the dangers of the railway before they ever have a reason to find out the hard way.
The programme is backed by a wide cross-section of the rail industry, from operators and contractors to infrastructure specialists. The goal, every UK school enrolled by 2027, is one that takes serious, sustained effort from a lot of organisations to achieve.
The programme currently has 136 rail businesses behind it, with 16,447 schools across the UK already engaged. 15,702 schools remain to be reached before the 2027 goal is met.
There is still a lot of ground to cover, and the number of organisations willing to help close that gap is what will determine whether the ambition becomes a reality.
What our partnership delivered in year one
Across the 10 schools COMET sponsored, one stood out in particular. Holbrook Primary in Coventry achieved Silver Certification by sharing the programme's resources with parents and carers, extending the safety message beyond the classroom and into the wider community. That kind of reach, from a single school into the homes of the families around it, is exactly what the programme is designed to produce.
In a sector where the consequences of not knowing the risks can be catastrophic and irreversible, that is not nothing.
Why this sits alongside our work in rail safety
COMET's involvement in rail extends well beyond this programme. We work with rail organisations on incident investigation, root cause analysis, and safety data analytics, helping teams understand why incidents happen and what needs to change to prevent them from happening again.
Rail Safety Week tends to focus, rightly, on the human cost of incidents on and around the railway. What it sometimes makes less visible is the work that goes into building the systems, the cultures, and the knowledge that stops those incidents from occurring. That work happens at every level. From the investigator understanding a near miss on a track maintenance job, to the classroom where a ten-year-old is learning why you never retrieve something that has fallen onto the tracks.
Both are highly important. The Rail Safe Friendly programme addresses something that professional safety management systems cannot: the gap in knowledge that exists before people are old enough to be trained formally. If a child grows up understanding the railway as a dangerous environment that demands respect, that knowledge will hopefully stay with them.
Going into year two
We have confirmed our second year with Rail Safe Friendly, and we are looking forward to building on what the first year produced.
If you work in the rail sector and are interested in what the Rail Safe Friendly programme does, or in how COMET supports rail organisations on investigation methodology and safety data, we would be delighted to speak with you.
