OUR PRESENTATION

Introduction
We at Wormholt Park Primary School chose safety in our environment as the issue we are focusing on for the Children’s Parliament. We chose this because we believe that litter and graffiti makes our environment dangerous and it can also make us feel unsafe. Litter can be harmful to people in many different ways. Such as, broken glass can lead to serious wounds. Also if you go to an area and you see graffiti on walls you may feel intimidated and you might not want to go to that area again.

Finding evidence
We had a class meeting to decide what features we were going to focus on and how we would gather evidence of the problems. We focused on what we considered to be safe and unsafe within our environment. After brainstorming these issues we chose 5 features of our environment, which concerned us most. We then decided to go on a walk around our local area to collect evidence of problems we could find. We looked at a local map to plan our route and then we went on a walk around the White City and Uxbridge Road area. We took a camera with us to record evidence of our findings.

Unfortunately we did find a lot of proof of both graffiti and litter. For example as you can see from this picture we found a wall covered in graffiti in an alleyway in Willow Vale. We also found a section on Uxbridge Road where people dump their rubbish. There is a sigh saying ‘do not dump rubbish’, however it is not an official council sign, therefore it is also classed as graffiti. However what distressed us the most was what appeared to be an abandoned house. There are a number of dangers in this setting. For example, we found a large piece of glass, which could be dangerous for all age groups.

We recorded all of our findings onto an environmental checklist sheet. On returning to school we used this to highlight our main concerns within out local area. The biggest problems seemed to be the great amount of litter, broken glass and graffiti that there was.

At the beginning of November we visited the Urban Studies Centre to speak to and discuss our findings with various people who work in our community. We spoke to Jean Botfield and Steve Wise, both of whom are Police Officers; Ade Kosoko and Amy Rodwell from the Youth Offending Team; Toni Wiltshire from the Community Safety Unit and Sean Mullings, who is a Street Warden. They all gave us very good advice about how to be safe in our local area. Sean Mullings advised us to call for an adult if we were to see someone doing graffiti and never to approach them.

Action!
With all of this good advice and information we have decided to make a leaflet explaining the problems caused by graffiti and litter. Our leaflet will be aimed at 10 – 18 year olds. It will also have bright colours to attract people’s attention and puzzles for the younger reader. In our leaflet we will also include our Top Ten Tips to Keep Safe on the Streets. We have already shared our findings with the rest of the school and also intend to do any assembly linked to our Top Ten Tips. Toni Wiltshire from the Community Safety Unit is also going to help us to display out tips on the ‘lockinlogin’ website. We also feel that it would be beneficial to the community to organise a fund raising activity for more resources to make our environment a safer place, for instance bins.

Finally, we would like to thank the Urban Studies Centre for all their support and thank you for listening.