The focus of Get Out! Stay Out! is surviving fire in the home setting. Fire moves fast – it spreads quickly giving you and your family less than three minutes to get out of the house safely.

Fire and Emergency has developed a fire safety programme Get Out! Stay Out! for young children and their families/whānau. Together with early childhood centres, educators, and carers, we aim to encourage fire-safe behaviours – most importantly, how to escape a fire safely.

We’ve kept the content and learning outcomes of Get Out! Stay Out! simple. This is to meet the range of learning abilities across this age group. Home fire safety for preschool children is the ultimate responsibility of parents and caregivers. It’s important that they know and understand the critical lifesaving actions that prevent unwanted fires from happening and prepare people to get out safely if a fire happens at home.

Get Out! Stay Out! uses principles from Te Whāriki Early Childhood Curriculum(external link). We have developed learning outcomes that support the different goals within the learning strands of Te Whāriki.

Get Out! Stay Out! also includes some take-home material to encourage parents and caregivers to get involved in home fire safety and take and responsibility for it. It emphasises the importance of children learning in their own homes as well as through early childhood providers.

The Get out! Stay Out! programme will help children learn the following concepts:

• Fire is hot and fast
• What smoke alarms and extinguishers are, and what they sound like
• The importance of shouting ‘Fire, fire, fire!’ when there is a fire to raise the alarm to others in the house
• In a fire, children should get out and stay out
• In a fire, children should meet family/whānau at a safe meeting place
• The role of the firefighter
• Matches and lighters safety: children should always give them to an adult. We encourage parents/caregivers to reinforce this at home.