Watch: UAE parents teach children how to raise alarm if they get trapped inside school bus

A tragic accident is what prompted Dubai mum Mehnaz to teach her children how to handle the situation if they were ever looked up in a bus. “A family friend lost their child after he was forgotten in a bus a few years ago,” she said.

“It was all around tragic and came at a time when everyone thought bus deaths were a thing of the past.”

At the time a video did the rounds on social media on what children should do if they get locked in a bus. “As soon as I got it, I showed my daughters who were 8 and 4 at the time,” she said.

“I revisited the topic every couple of months to see if they remembered it and they did. In fact, they also shared it with their friends. I am grateful that they were never in a position to use that knowledge, but I believe that video should be shown to all children.”

The video shows how a child locked inside the bus gets into the driver's seat and presses the horn until an adult is alerted.

Here is the video:

This comes as a study by Sharjah's Child Safety Department (CSD) in collaboration with the emirate's Civil Defence Authority revealed that half of UAE children aged between 6 and 8 wouldn't know what to do in case they are trapped and forgotten inside their school buses.

Important to teach children

According to Mehnaz, knowing the family (victim's) really changed her perspective. “We usually don’t give these things as much importance because we imagine that the likelihood for it to actually happen is less,” she said.

“But having experienced it so close and seeing the grief the family went through, we took it very seriously and felt that it was important to teach our children the safety measures.”

Several new guidelines have been introduced in school buses in the UAE over the years to prevent accidents. New technology which required all students to tag in and out of buses and a requirement by bus assistants to check each row of the bus before putting a ‘No children on board’ sign up were just some of the laws introduced over the years.

• UAE: 50% of children don't know how to exit school bus if trapped inside, study reveals