Recognition Express, the UK’s leading franchise supplying promotional gifts & printed products, has announced that it will be running its popular Road Safety Design competition for the fourth year in a row.

Recognition Express first joined forces with national road safety charity Brake, in 2009 to help engage children about staying safe around roads and traffic.

The theme of this year’s Road Safety Banner Design Competition will be Slower speeds=happy people, in keeping with the topic for Road Safety Week, which runs 19-25 November.

Following on from the success of last year’s competition children aged 4-11 are being invited to submit their ideas for a Road Safety Banner to display outside their school to help get the message across to road users to Slow Down.

There will be 12 regional prize winners each of whom will receive a full-sized printed version of their banner and 300 high-vis drawstring bags for their school, plus a ‘golden star’ award for themselves.

Every school that participates will be given free annual membership to Brake, which includes a Road Safety Week e-action pack with downloadable posters, and tips on activities that schools can run during the week, as well as on-going news bulletins on other Brake initiatives and campaigns.

This year competition details are being sent via email direct to schools in the first week of September, but information is also available on the Recognition Express website at www.recognition-express.com/roadsafetyweek. The closing date for entries is Friday 19 October.

Said Nigel Toplis, Managing Director, Recognition Express: “This competition is one of the highlights of our year at Recognition Express. The children put in a tremendous amount of time and effort into their designs and the results are fabulous. The only difficulty is trying to select the winner! Brake does an excellent job of keeping road safety on the political agenda and we fully support their campaign to introduce 20mph speed limits around homes, schools and shops.”

Richard Coteau, corporate liaison at Brake said “Brake is pleased to again be working in partnership with Recognition Express on their Design A Banner competition to help raise awareness about road safety. It’s been a great success and is a fun and educational way to teach important road safety messages that help to prevent children being hurt and killed on our roads. We would encourage schools across the country to enter the competition and use it to start planning other lessons and activities for this year’s Road Safety Week.”