TACS for Teachers - DHL UK Foundation

Helping children behave safely around large vehicles

Trucks and Child Safety (TACS) is a road safety training programme run by the DHL business and funded by the DHL UK Foundation. Working with schools and community organisations, our TACS team teach children aged 7 to 11 years how to keep themselves safe around large vehicles. Our team of trained demonstrators are all DBS checked and are fully committed to teaching children about road safety.

Face to face demonstrations and classroom sessions are free of charge and offer a learning platform for young people to improve their safety awareness of this important issue.

Face to face demo

Classroom session

FAQs

TACS makes a real difference

Every day, a child in the UK is seriously injured in a road traffic accident. DHL is striving to reduce this number and the TACS programme plays a key role in helping us to play our part in achieving this.

Safety awareness of trucks

(available post Covid-19 restrictions)
Most children are unaware of just how big, loud and powerful trucks can be. A live TACS team demonstration offers them an eye-opening intro to these 44-tonne vehicles, explaining the importance of being safety-aware.

Understanding blind spots

A truck driver’s blind spots are surprisingly large, compared to a car driver for example. The TACS programme helps children understand how these blind spots can make trucks dangerous to be around and explains how to look at these vehicles with new eyes and understanding.

Easy to remember safety steps

Most importantly of all, TACS offers kids practical, easy-to-remember guidance for staying safe around trucks and other large vehicles. We keep things simple to enable easy recall, and offer downloadable posters and merchandise to keep key messages front of mind.

Get your school or community organisation involved

Our TACS programme comprises of a face to face demonstration or classroom session. The face to face demonstrations are available to schools and community groups and involve a DHL demonstrator coming into school and teaching your class all about road safety using a real 44-tonne DHL truck.

Due to temporary restrictions, we cannot currently offer these in-person visits. In their place, however, the TACS team has produced a fun teacher led classroom session, available to both schools and community organisations, that can be overseen by a teacher or youth leader.

TACS face to face demonstration

Face to face demonstrations are available to schools across the UK. While our on-site visits – guest-starring a huge DHL truck – are currently on hold, you’re still welcome to enquire about booking one of these face to face demonstrations. We’ll then be in touch as soon as we can offer live demonstrations again to schedule a date for your school or youth club.

TACS classroom session

Our downloadable TACS classroom session is free and available to both schools and community organisations. We provide you with a teacher led easy-to-use PowerPoint deck and a lesson plan to make sure you have everything you need to deliver the session to your class. We also send you a TACS merchandise pack, including pencils, wristbands and workbooks for the children to fill out during the session.

Get in touch

Register your interest for a face to face demonstration, classroom session and to order merchandise and a member of our dedicated team will be in touch.

FAQs

Trucks and Child Safety (TACS) is a national road safety training programme funded by the DHL UK Foundation and run by specially trained employees of DHL. It is delivered free of charge and aims to teach children aged between 7 and 11 to be safe on the road by creating a greater awareness of larger vehicles and their associated dangers.

Our website provides a link to our classroom session which is an easily downloadable work session with videos and activities and provides the same message to primary school children about the dangers of large vehicles. This is useful for schools or organisations to use whilst unable to accept external visitors but also for those who do not have access for a large vehicle.

The live demonstration is face to face and fully interactive – trained demonstrators bring a large vehicle onto school or community organisation ground and provide a 30 minute demonstration safely around the vehicle to primary aged children.

The classroom session is not planned to replace the face to face demonstration so if your school or community organisation has access for a large vehicle, you can have both!

Taking huge trucks into schools and community organisations, trained demonstrators teach children about the dangers of trucks as well as road safety. It’s highly interactive and there are lots of opportunities for children to be actively involved and experience life in a big truck.

The demonstrations are delivered by trained DHL employees and include:

What exactly the driver can or cannot see in the mirrors
Awareness of the dimensions of a truck
Just how loud is the engine?
What and where are the trucks blind spots?
How difficult it is it for a driver whilst inside the cab to hear a child shouting
Where to stand safely on the pavement when a truck is turning left at a junction
How to walk safely around the truck
What to do if a football runs under a truck

Each child who takes part will receive appropriate merchandise consisting of a pencil and wristband along with a workbook aimed at the target audience which allows for different levels of learning.

If your school or community organisation are interested to find out more from our TACS team, please email talking.tacs@dhl.com. Our trained demonstrators will be in contact to arrange a mutually convenient time to meet with you and discuss the requirements for the day; how the sessions will run and carry out a risk assessment to consider the necessary safety points when bringing a large vehicle onto your grounds and also share our COVID risk assessment.

TACS demonstrators are employed by the DHL business and are specially trained to undertake TACS demonstrations. Each demonstrator attends a one day mandatory training session, undertakes a DBS check which is renewed every two years and fully commits to our safeguarding procedures.