Finding out she was pregnant with twins was a happy surprise for Lynn Taylor and her husband but a surprise nonetheless, and one which led to their brood doubling in size. So when Mrs Taylor, a primary teacher, was browsing through The TESS looking for a new challenge and came across a job that offered flexible working hours, she jumped at it.
“Having double the number of children turned our lives upside down in a wonderful, chaotic way, so I was hoping to find something with a wee bit more flexibility to fit in with our new lifestyle,” she explains.
Mrs Taylor, who worked part-time at St Brigid’s Primary in Wishaw, is four months into the job with Road Safety Scotland, designing a new road safety resource to replace The Children’s Traffic Club, aimed at children in the early years.
“We’re in the consultation process and I’m involved in speaking to many different people, including schools, nurseries, playgroups and road safety units from around the country, to find out which direction the new resource should take,” she says. “I’ve been overwhelmed by the response from people keen to help us make this resource something special.”
When using the club with her own children and in the classroom, Mrs Taylor had always thought it had the potential to be much more. With her background in primary teaching and artistic skill, she hopes to make it all it can be: “I had been to art school and studied illustration for a couple of years, but I changed my mind and followed my heart to apply for the BEd.”
Mrs Taylor graduated from St Andrew’s College of Education in 1998. She says of the new resource, which will be aimed at three to six-year-olds: “It is going to be uniquely Scottish, meet the key aspirations of A Curriculum for Excellence, and hopefully exciting and motivating for our young people.”
The Children’s Traffic Club was aimed more at parents than teachers, she feels, and had to be adapted for use in the classroom. Its replacement will be something that teachers can just “pick up and use” but equally something that appeals to parents - and, of course, children. “We are hoping to produce something of quality which children love and want to copy,” she says.
Mrs Taylor wants to create something as memorable and iconic for the current generation as Tufty the squirrel was for children raised in the 1960s and 1970s. Through very simple films, books and stories, Tufty persuaded pre-school children that the road could be a dangerous place. “Hopefully, it will have the same kind of appeal - that X factor.”
