Crucial Crew is a health and safety education scheme aimed at year 6 children. Its objective is to teach young children how to keep themselves safe and prepare them to be good citizens.
Crucial Crew has operated in Scarborough for the past 17 years. Each year approximately 1,600 – 1,700 children from 70 different schools attend Crucial Crew to be given ‘crucial’ information, which will help them on their journeys through life. There are usually 10 different scenario’s for the children to attend, these include input from the fire service, police service, coastguard, health and safety executive, and gas and electric board as well as ourselves.For the past ten plus years the Cambridge Centre have set up a room in the TA Centre, Newby to resemble a disco. We have disco lights and music. One of the Cambridge Centre staff positions themselves at the entrance with a white paper bag full of mints (which look very much like pills) they encourage the children to take a sweet. Most children refuse to take one as they have been told by their older brother’s or sister’s, who have previously attended crucial crew not to take one. Some of the children are just wary of taking one as they do not know us and other’s take one as they are curious to what they are and why we are giving them out.
After the children have sat down we begin by asking them to name some drugs.· The majority of children start by naming the illegal drugs and medicines.· We then remind them that there are other legal drugs, drugs which they most probably use themselves. Most of the children looked shocked by this; we inform them of caffeine and then move onto alcohol and tobacco.· The message we want them to gain from the initial discussion is that all drugs are dangerous not just the illegal drugs.· If someone is to drink too much alcohol they could get alcoholic poisoning, if someone is to take too much medicine they could end up overdosing.
We then discuss sharing medicine.· The majority of children are aware that sharing medicine is dangerous.· We discuss the possibility of being allergic to certain medicine and that if medicine is prescribed by a doctor it should only be used by the person it is prescribed too, we also mention medicines like calpol and explain that this can be used by themselves and brothers and sisters if administered by an adult and the correct dosage is given.· We then move onto asking the children what they would do if they were to find a pill bottle on the floor.· A lot of children say that they wouldn’t touch the pill bottle as they are worried about germs and also worried that they would get into trouble by the police if they were found with the pill bottle.· We inform the children that as long as the pill bottle is in tact and not broken that they are quite safe to pick it up, we explain that they can wash their hands afterwards and that they should stop watching CSI as they are not going to get into trouble by the police.
We tell them that we would like them to take the pill bottle to a responsible adult that they either know or trust, for example a teacher, parent, older relative, police officer or pharmacist.· We explain that it is not acceptable for them to put the bottle in the bin as it could fall out again.· Most of the children tell us that they have been able to open child proof caps for a number of years so we draw their attention to smaller children and explain that a lot of younger children may think the pills are sweets, open the bottle, take them all and end up very ill.· We ask the children to help to keep the streets safer for children much younger than they are.· We then move onto asking the children what they would do if they found a needle.· A lot of the children start off by saying they would pick the needle up and take it to a responsible adult as they would the pill bottle.· We inform the children very clearly that this IS NOT what we want them to do and the NEEDLE is totally different to the PILL BOTTLE.
We explain that if the needle were to prick them they would not be able to wash these germs off.· We explain briefly what blood born viruses are and how these can pass from person to person, we make it clear that there are no cures for some of the blood born viruses and that it is never worth the risk of contracting one of these viruses.· We tell the children never to touch a needle with any part of their bodies; we tell them that the needle is sharp enough to go through clothes and gloves etc.We tell the children that although they can’t touch the needle they must still do something as they need to keep the streets safer for other younger children. We ask them to look around for something solid, for example a brick, stone, piece of wood big enough to cover the needle, we make it clear that we do not want them to break the needle as this would be very dangerous.· We ask them to cover the needle so that it is out of sight and then go and find a responsible adult, tell them where the needle is and the adult will then contact the environmental health service, someone will come out, pick the needle up with some rubbish grabbers and put it into a sharps container, the sharps container is then taken and incinerated.
We ask the children to recap on what they have learnt and just before they leave we ask them to tell us if they took a pill at the door.· At this point a lot of the children look slightly worried.· We reassure them that they are safe and what they ate was only a mint.· We remind them of the dangers of taking things from strangers.· We also inform them that as they get older some of their friends might start taking drugs and that if they have a good experience they might offer drugs to them. We inform the children that the same drug can have two very different effects on people and that they only way to make sure ·you are completely safe is by refusing to take anything whether offered by a friend or stranger. We have had very positive feedback over the years from parents, teachers and the children themselves.
The messages given at Crucial Crew are presented in such a way that the children always remember them; this is why it is such a successful and important scheme.
Alan Bruce, who is a retired Police Officer, is the Crucial Crew Co-ordinator for Scarborough Whitby and Ryedale.··· The scheme receives sponsorship from Skipton Building Society and in the year 2009 Extended schools.
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