Diary Of An ADI

At the test centre today, we arrived and parked in the usual place. Well, more or less. 

At Chalfont Drive, it is customary to park with the centre on your left – facing towards the Beechdale Road end. Common sense would dictate that the first arrival parks as close to the gates as they can, and subsequent arrivals park sensibly backwards from there. This way, everyone – as many as eight tests go out at a time – gets a place to stop.

Unfortunately, an increasing number of instructors are trying to make life easy for their own pupils wihtout giving a thought for anyone else’s. You get them parking with 2 or more car-length gaps so their pupils can get out easily when the test starts. You get them parking away from the gate, even if they’re there first. Basically, they’re idiots who shouldn’t be submitting their pupils to test in the first place if they can’t drive out from behind another car without having a 15 metre gap to aid them (or if they don’t know the meaning of the phrase ‘convenient location’ when it comes to stopping).

Today it was even worse. It turned out there was someone waiting for test who’d been taught by her husband. They’d parked their car on the left side of the road – but facing the opposite way. Talk about starting off on the wrong foot – it’s almost a driver fault before they even get in the car!

And when she returned at the end - the examiner had obviously asked her to pull up on the left as they came in from the Beechdale end – she apparently deliberately parked it about half on the pavement! There was definitely something not right, because about 60 seconds later, the car reversed backwards, then parked properly on the road.

With the recession, an increasing number of people are turning up to test without having had any professional tuition. But it has to be false economy for many of them if they are making these sorts of mistakes. After all, time is money, so whoever is doing the ‘training’ has to value their time at nothing in order for this method to cost less than using an ADI. And the longer it goes on, the more bad habits have to be broken when they eventually do realise that they need to do it properly. One way or another, learning to drive costs money.

I also suspect that some of the people who fail when training by this route are driving illegally anyway in between times. International licence rules have a very flexible interpretation for some people.

On another forum I just saw a discussion about how many hours it takes to learn to drive. This question crops up a lot in one form or another.

The DSA says (as of January 2011) that people who pass their tests have typically had about 47 hours of professional training with an ADI combined with about 20 hours of private practice. These figures vary a little from time to time as new data are added, and in any case are by no means absolute numbers.

Naturally, a thread such is this is the only prompt needed for some ADIs to start boasting how they did it in 10 or 12 hours – thus demonstrating why the pass-quick-pay-little mentality gets in the way of decent ADIs doing their jobs properly in the first place.

If the right person came along, they could take their driving test and pass it without having had a single second of tuition or practice for the driving test – but statistically, the odds of that happening are extremely low. And at the other end of the spectrum, you could get someone who is never, ever going to be able to drive – no matter how many lessons they have. These are not as rare as you might think, but many just give up when they realise they can’t do it and so never get to test standard.

So, the majority of people require SOME tuition and it averages out at about 47 hours for most of those who pass their tests in the end. Yes, some can do it quicker. Yes, some take longer. But we’re talking about that statistics thing most ADIs cannot understand: the meaning of the phrase ‘on average’.

I’ve had a few people pass in a little over 20 hours, having had no experience of driving at all before that, and in one case I can remember, no opportunity to do any private practice either. I’ve also had people pass having taken well over 80 hours with lots of private practice on top. It all depends on the individual.

I think I’ve mentioned in the past about how I am always uneasy when someone passes quickly – not because it means I can’t get money from them any more, but because they may go out on the roads thinking that they are better than they really are. One common conversation I have with pupils after they’ve emerged too quickly from a junction or on to a roundabout, and we’re analysing the fault, involves explaining that what their heads think they can do is not the same as what their bodies are actually capable of doing at this stage in their driving careers – and they mustn’t try to copy what their family or friends do.

Only last night, when I was talking to a pupil about her need to be 1mph over the speed limit all the time, to go hurtling into situations she’s incapable of handling quickly (so speed makes it even harder), and forgetting the speed limit until she’s accelerated over it, she said:

Well, the reason I do it is because I’m always out with people who drive like that.

Honestly, that’s exactly what she said. And later that evening when I raised it with her mum (who wants her to do Pass Plus when she passes), she said:

It’s her best friend who she’s talking about - she drives like that to show off and [Jane] is trying to copy her.

Can you imagine what someone like this would behave like on the roads – and what a mess they could easily get into – if they passed their test too quickly without gaining valuable experience?

What worries me even more is that some of the people who boast about fast learners are also selling the idea of fast cars to those learners. One poster comments that he knows of an ADI teaching people in a Subaru WRX, who takes learners to a race track to drive fast, and who is openly scathing of speed limits. So imagine:

• you have a learner who attracted by the Subaru and so books lessons
• he’ll already have a certain attitude towards speed and road behaviour, and even life in general, otherwise he wouldn’t be there
• he’ll be further conditioned to be cynical of speed limits by the ADI
• the ADI is merely showing off and behaving as immaturely as the person he’s teaching
• the learner will be soaking it up like a sponge
• being more porous than most (the Subaru attracted him, remember) he’ll soak up all the wrong things

This is a real scenario, and it is not going to produce a driver who has respect for the law or his own driving skills. It is not going to produce a driver who has consideration for others. It’s going to produce a driver who is the epitome of what the DSA wants to try and stamp out, and what no ADI should be within a hundred miles of teaching.

The GDE Matrix springs to mind here. If ADIs are to be expected to get involved in the so-called ‘higher levels’, how can they possibly do that effectively if they are doing it in prat bait?