IMAGINATIVE children teamed up with musicians to highlight lifesaving messages.

Pupils performed a unique theatre performance tackling safety issues and received a standing ovation at Runcorn's Brindley theatre.

Safer Together was the result of a collaboration between Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service and the Manchester Camerata orchestra.

The fire service’s prevention department worked with a composer, theatre maker and musicians from Manchester Camerata to highlight key water, home, rural and anti-social safety issues from an intergenerational perspective.

Nick Evans, head of prevention at Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service, said: “The performance brought the house down and was a really fantastic evening.

“Each scenario will be explored from both a young person’s and an older person’s perspective, portraying how they might respond to different emergency situations and showing the right and wrong ways to act.

“This was an innovative project which has brought young and older people together to learn about mutual safety issues and then work with professional musicians and prevention staff to creatively express what they have learned.”

Pupils from Halton Lodge Primary School in Runcorn and children from across Cheshire teamed up with U3A - University of the Third Age in Warrington, Frodsham Players and Ellesmere Port Musical Theatre Company.

They have been working on the project since March after meeting at the fire service’s new interactive lifeskills education centre Safety Central.

A series of workshops was held to devise and rehearse the performance, which portrayed the causes and consequences of a series of scenarios based on real-life stories to highlight the need to be more vigilant and safety conscious.