BE-Ready! is a free, multi-hazard disaster preparedness education programme for primary school children developed by the Belgian National Crisis Centre. It combines a three-part interactive teaching package differentiated across all three primary school year bands, with a complementary online preparedness game, giving teachers ready-to-use tools to embed emergency awareness and response skills into everyday classroom learning.
Map
BE-Ready!
General Information
ISIG
A national school-based preparedness programme that uses classroom materials and a game to teach primary school children how to recognise risks and act safely in emergencies.
Developed and distributed by Belgium's National Crisis Centre, under the Federal Public Service Interior, BE-Ready! consists of three interactive teaching packages differentiated by year group (ages 6–8, 8–10, and 10–12), each aligned with Belgian primary school development objectives. The programme covers up to 14 hazard-specific scenarios, including floods, storms, fires, industrial accidents, nuclear incidents, epidemics, power outages, cybersecurity threats, and terrorism, through classroom lessons, videos, worksheets, and Belgium hazard maps with stickers. Each degree also includes a parent information brochure to extend preparedness learning into the home. Complementing the classroom materials, the online BE-Ready! game challenges children to make correct decisions under time pressure across fire, flood, and chemical accident scenarios, combining preparedness content with game mechanics in a freely accessible digital format. The programme directly links to BE-Alert, Belgium's national population warning system.
Belgium faces a wide multi-hazard risk profile: flooding, severe storms, industrial and chemical accidents, nuclear risk, cybersecurity threats, and pandemic/epidemic risk — all of which have been formally assessed in the Belgian National Risk Assessment (2018–2023, with a new iteration covering 2023–2026). The 2021 Meuse and Vesdre valley floods, among the most destructive in Belgian history, reinforced the urgency of preparedness at community and household level.
The NCCN has a formal mandate to increase public resilience and launch preventive information campaigns on risks in Belgium. BE-Ready! is one expression of this mandate, targeting children at primary school age as both direct beneficiaries and vectors of preparedness knowledge into households. The initiative reflects the NCCN's recognition that building a safety culture requires reaching citizens early and systematically, through trusted institutions such as schools, and that children are particularly effective agents of behavioral change within their families.
Hazard Type
Geographical Scope - Nuts
Population Size
Population Density
Needs Addressed
- Children are often underrepresented in national preparedness strategies despite being a vulnerable group during emergencies. Schools frequently lack structured, age-appropriate materials to teach risk awareness and protective behaviours. This creates gaps in household preparedness and limits the development of a long-term culture of resilience. Primary school age is identified internationally as a particularly effective window for instilling preparedness habits and behavioral reflexes that persist into adulthood.
- Belgium's emergency management system relies on a combination of professional services and informed citizen action, particularly in the critical first minutes of an emergency. Yet public knowledge of correct responses is not systematically transmitted through school education. Teachers, like the general public, are often uncertain about what guidance to give.
- The hazard landscape is genuinely diverse, with risks varying by region. A single-hazard approach would leave children unprepared for the full range of scenarios they may actually face. BE-Ready! addresses this by offering hazard-specific lessons that can be selected to match local risk profiles, alongside a baseline multi-hazard curriculum.
The primary and exclusive target group is primary school children aged 6–12. Children are both vulnerable (less physically and cognitively equipped to act independently in emergencies) and strategically important for extending preparedness awareness into their households and wider family networks. The parent information brochure distributed at each degree explicitly leverages this dynamic.
The case represents a federally developed and nationally distributed initiative, created by the Belgian National Crisis Centre — the federal body responsible for coordinating emergency planning and crisis management policy in Belgium, operating under the Federal Public Service Interior. The programme's content, hazard guidance, and branding are defined at federal level and distributed uniformly across Belgium's three linguistic communities. While schools adopt the programme voluntarily and teachers deliver it with pedagogical discretion, the governance of the initiative itself is firmly centralised within the federal crisis management authority.
BE-Ready! is systematically structured across school year groups with defined learning objectives, hazard-specific content, and curriculum alignment. It connects directly to Belgium's national alerting infrastructure (BE-Alert) and emergency services guidance (112.be), situating the programme within the broader national emergency management architecture rather than treating preparedness as an isolated educational activity.
The printed teaching packages, worksheets, and Belgium hazard maps function without any digital infrastructure, making the programme accessible in schools with basic facilities. The online BE-Ready! game and video content require internet-connected devices, which are widely available in Belgian primary schools. Both delivery modes are intentionally supported, ensuring the programme functions across a wide range of school infrastructure levels.
To build awareness and correct behavioral reflexes across Belgium's primary school population, and to extend preparedness knowledge into households through children as knowledge carriers.
Interactive classroom lessons; age-appropriate worksheets and activities; Belgium hazard maps with stickers; videos (degrees 2 and 3); online preparedness game with time pressure and scenario-based decision-making; parent information brochures; personal emergency plan template for families.
The initiative primarily builds awareness and understanding among children. While it encourages behavioural change at household level, strategic decision-making remains with public authorities and education institutions.
The programme strengthens long-term societal resilience by embedding preparedness knowledge early in life. Its sustainability relies on continued integration into school curricula and periodic updating of materials.
Vulnerable Groups
Governance
Emergency Preparedness
Engagement Level
Empowerment Level
Implementation
- Comprehensive multi-hazard scope for a primary school audience. BE-Ready! provides dedicated lessons for up to 14 different hazard types, including some rarely addressed in school programmes at this age level.
- A three-degree differentiation: content is developmentally appropriate and progressively sequenced from ages 6–8 through ages 8–10 to ages 10–12. Each degree includes its own learning objectives, teaching package, video content, and parent brochures, creating a coherent six-year preparedness learning journey through primary school.
- The online BE-Ready! game provides an interactive, game-mechanics-based complement to classroom learning: children must perform the correct actions under time pressure various scenarios, reinforcing decision-making skills and correct behavioral reflexes in an engaging format directly accessible from the school or home.
- Integration of parent-facing materials: each degree includes a downloadable information brochure designed to be printed and shared with families, extending the reach of preparedness education beyond the classroom and connecting school learning to household preparedness planning. The programme also provides a blank personal emergency plan template for degree 2 students, enabling families to create their own household emergency plan.
French, Dutch, German — the programme is available in all three official languages of Belgium.
The Belgian National Crisis Centre (NCCN), operating under the Federal Public Service Interior (FPS Interior), is the sole developer and distributor of the programme. BE-Ready! is delivered through the NCCN's public communication and resilience-building mandate, made freely available to all Belgian primary schools without intermediary organisations.
The Belgian National Crisis Centre is the federal authority responsible for national emergency planning, risk analysis, and crisis coordination. It has extensive experience in public preparedness campaigns and multi-hazard risk management.
- The Belgian National Crisis Centre as developer, content owner, and programme manager;
- Primary school teachers across Belgium's three linguistic communities as primary implementers;
- Primary school children aged 6–12 as direct beneficiaries; parents and family members reached through the parent brochure component;
- Belgium's three linguistic community education authorities, within whose curriculum frameworks schools operate;
- Emergency services, whose guidance underpins the programme content.
- Programme design and curriculum alignment
- Development of teaching materials and serious game
- Pilot testing in schools
- National rollout and teacher support
- Monitoring, feedback, and iterative improvement
- trained educators
- curriculum integration support
- development and maintenance of the game
- coordination between education and emergency authorities
- communication and dissemination resources
The programme is free to access and requires no specialist equipment or training. Teachers need internet-connected devices to access and display digital content and the online game; a printer for optional worksheets and parent brochures; and standard classroom presentation tools. Physical Belgium hazard maps with stickers can be ordered directly from the NCCN at no cost. No first aid equipment, specialist software, or external facilitators are required.
The programme is designed for delivery across the six years of Belgian primary school education, with dedicated content for each two-year band. Each degree's materials represent a structured learning sequence that can be integrated into existing timetables progressively over an academic year, with hazard-specific lessons available for focused use at any time. There is no fixed delivery deadline: schools adopt the programme at their own pace and can return to content across years to reinforce learning.
Experience of the Implementing Organisation in DRM
Target Audience
Resources Required
Timeframe & Phases
Participation Results
- A multi-hazard scope is an asset when backed by a national risk assessment: by grounding the programme in Belgium's formally assessed national risk profile, the NCCN ensures that the content reflects real exposures rather than generic or imported frameworks.
- Embedding preparedness in the school system increases reach and repetition.
- The parent brochure is a low-cost, high-leverage design choice: by giving children something to bring home, the programme converts school-level learning into a household conversation and a tangible household output.
- Ensuring consistent uptake across Belgium's education landscape. Education in Belgium is a community competence, meaning the NCCN has no authority to mandate adoption. Adaptive strategy: make the resource as frictionless as possible — free, available in all three languages, curriculum-aligned, requiring no specialist training, and directly downloadable — so the decision to adopt involves minimal institutional or individual cost.
- Breadth of the hazard scope. Covering 14+ distinct risk types risks superficiality. The three-degree structure addresses this by building complexity progressively, and the hazard-specific lesson library allows schools to prioritise the most locally relevant content.
- Content currency is an ongoing challenge for any risk communication programme. The addition of a COVID-19 module during the pandemic demonstrates the NCCN's capacity to update content in response to emerging risks, which is an important credibility mechanism.
- Programme's household reach. The online game, which is publicly accessible rather than school-only, partially mitigates this by enabling children and families to engage outside of school hours at any time.
- Low or uneven teacher uptake. Mitigation relies primarily on the programme's zero-barrier design and on the NCCN's communications campaigns, including Back-to-School outreach that resurfaces the programme at the start of each academic year.
- Misinformation or misapplication of guidance. Mitigation relies on the NCCN's status as the official federal crisis authority: all content reflects official Belgian emergency guidance and links directly to authoritative sources.
- Digital access inequality is partially mitigated by the programme's dual format: all core lesson content is available in printable form without internet access.
Risk & Mitigation Plan
Scalability and Sustainability
The programme is an integral part of the NCCN's statutory mandate to increase public resilience and deliver preventive information campaigns, and is funded within the NCCN's core federal budget. In other words, the programme exists as a sustained public service delivered by a permanent federal institution. Sustainability is further reinforced by the programme's integration into Belgium's Back-to-School communications cycle and its connection to the broader national crisis communication infrastructure.
Within Belgium, the programme scales efficiently as a nationally distributed digital resource. The hazard-specific lesson library is inherently scalable — new lessons can be added as the Belgian risk profile evolves.
Adaptability to other national contexts is high but requires meaningful localisation. The core design principles — multi-hazard scope, degree-differentiated content, parent communication component, game-based reinforcement, and connection to national alerting infrastructure — are transferable. Effective adaptation requires: review and replacement of hazard content to match the local risk assessment; alignment with the local curriculum framework; context-specific guidance; and a government or institutional body willing to maintain and distribute the programme over time.
The NCCN's role as both content authority and distribution channel is a key enabler that would need to be replicated in any transfer context.
The case combines two complementary delivery modes: printable teaching packages (low-tech, offline-capable) and an online preparedness game. The game is the primary technology-enabled innovation. The dual-format design ensures the programme remains usable across schools with varying levels of digital infrastructure.
No public information was found on the NCCN's internal development costs (design, translation, web development, game production, video production).
For adopting schools: the programme is entirely free to access, download, and use. Optional physical materials (Belgium hazard maps with stickers) are available on request from the NCCN at no cost to schools.
For the NCCN: Operational costs likely include platform hosting and maintenance, content updates as the national risk profile evolves, translation maintenance across three languages, and communications campaigns to promote adoption.
For adopting schools: Ongoing costs are likely limited to teacher time for lesson preparation and delivery, and optional printing of parent brochures and worksheets.
- Embedding programmes within formal education systems ensures longevity.
- Cross-ministerial cooperation (education–civil protection) is essential.
- Digital learning tools require periodic maintenance funding.
- Teacher ownership is a key determinant of long-term success.