One from the newsfeeds drags the old chestnut about teaching 11-year olds to drive. I’ve written about this before, most recently last year, but it goes back further.
Let’s not try and disguise the fact that the main beneficiaries are the people who provide these lessons – not those who take them. A normal, quality learner lesson costs about £23-£25, but these things are charged at £60 an hour. There is absolutely no way the vast majority of those taking them are going to get up to test standard at that price, and the “lessons” amount to little more than a ride round a go-kart track in a real car. Indeed, I recently took on a pupil who had had one of these sessions, and in absolute honesty you couldn’t tell. She was no different to someone who’d sat in the car on a driveway or in a car park with mum or dad and made the car go forward a bit.
In one of my earlier articles on this subject I quoted one 11-year old driving a car for the first time as saying:
How cool is this?
That was in 2012. He will be 13 now, and still has at least four years to go before he can drive legally. Unless mummy and daddy have kept up the lessons (and they’ll have forked out up to £1,500 by now even at one lesson a month, assuming he hasn’t got bored of driving round the same circuit) he will have done nothing.
This current story is almost an exact parallel:
[name removed] is 11 and was very excited at the prospect of driving a car for the first time.
I’ll bet he was. And I’ll also bet that it will come as a major disappointment when he realises that unless mummy and daddy have very deep pockets, it will also be the last time for at least the next six years. Well, legally, anyway.
Then there is this comment:
Given [name removed] is just 5ft he was given three cushions to make sure he was high enough to see over the steering wheel and reach the all important pedals.
Or, in other words, he is too small to drive safely in the first place. And even then, going by the photo, he is barely at eye-level with the steering wheel.
And the most telling comment:
As the hour lesson goes on his confidence is clearly building and we are getting quicker.
Oh dear. Getting “quicker”. And there we have the common denominators in the majority of accidents involving new drivers – over-confident and too fast for their ability.
These courses do absolutely nothing to help children’s’ Immature and juvenile minds, and they simply cannot handle adult activities like driving. Nor should they be expected to, and they definitely shouldn’t be encouraged to try.