An email bulletin from the DSA states that from 7 April 2014, candidates will no longer be able to take Theory Tests with foreign language voiceovers, or Practical Driving Tests using an interpreter. This action follows the consultation carried out earlier this year, the results of which can be read here.
Note that Special Needs candidates will still be able to take their Theory Tests with English or Welsh voiceovers, and hearing-impaired candidates will still be able to take the Theory Test in British Sign Language (BSL) and use a BSL interpreter on their Practical Test. Other candidates will still be able to take their tests in Welsh (though Lord knows why they should have to, except in order to make some sort of political statement).
I fully support this action. However, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of it just yet…
And I also predict a rush of people hurrying to take tests before the deadline, so anyone learning to drive should bear this in mind as it is possible waiting times will increase.
Can I use an interpreter on my Practical Test?
Yes, until 7 April 2014. After that time you will have to do the test in English or Welsh.
Can I do my Theory Test with a voiceover in my first language?
Yes, until 7 April 2014 – and assuming that your language is one of those supported. After that time you will have to do the test in English or Welsh.
Well done Bryn, who passed first time today with just 5 driver faults. He shared the same sense of humour as me – sarcasm – especially when he’d done something wrong, so he’s been a great pupil to teach. We’ve had a lot of laughs.
It was a good start moving away from his house. I said, “when you’re ready, off we go”, and nothing happened. Then, nothing happened some more. He went for the ignition key, and I said “it’s on – unless you’ve stalled it” (he hadn’t). Then, nothing happened one more time. I leaned over and said “it goes better if you use the gas instead of the brake!” And then, later, there was that cardinal sin which is guaranteed to open my sarcastic floodgates – following other traffic.
I can never explain why perfectly competent drivers – and I know they are competent – do silly things like this, but Bryn is an excellent driver and was nervous as hell. So it all worked out well in the end.
I’m a bit late putting this up, but well done Matthew, who passed first time on Friday with just 3 driver faults. He’s been a nice guy to teach – and we got that serious case of “bungee leg” under control, after all!
Anyway, he keeps my pass rate at 60% for the year to date, and he gets me back on track after two recent fails – one of which is unfortunately a serial failer, with 5 fails to date, always for something different (we’ll get there, though, no matter how long it takes).
In a nutshell, a learner driver in Huddersfield was on their driving test when they were involved in an accident at a roundabout. The story clearly points out that:
The other car failed to stop after the collision.
And yet it can’t resist saying:
A learner driver taking their driving test crashed into a roundabout on Bradford Road this morning.
You don’t need to be a genius to work out that the car which left the scene might – just might – have been in the wrong. You also don’t need to be a genius to see that the learner didn’t “crash into” the roundabout – that was where she came to rest (and only one wheel is on the roundabout anyway). The Huddersfield Daily Examiner clearly doesn’t run to employing journalists who are even partly capable of reporting or investigating a story properly. It also doesn’t seem to run to having higher primates among its readership. The one comment on the story reads:
Martin Steer
I assume her instructions were “straight across at the roundabout”.
I bet he is an absolute riot at the bottom of the pond, where he clearly lives most of the time. Frighteningly, he also appears to be a bus driver in the area. I wonder if his employers are aware of his flippant attitude?
Edit 10/10/2013: Actually, the vultures HAVE picked up on it now. There is an updated story in the Daily Mail, and it dates from 7th October – this blog article was written on 4th October, and drew on information suggesting the incident in question had occurred several days before that. Obviously, it took a while for the story to drain down into the sewers.
The particular branch of the sewer the story has reached seems to think it is funny, and so far two out of three respondents have made childish and highly questionable comments about the injuries sustained by the examiner involved. It never ceases to amaze me what passes as “fit and proper” in this industry.
This story somehow managed to spam the newsfeeds, coming in numerous times. The title of the piece laughingly trumpets that the source is an “expert instructor”.
To start with, there is no such thing as an “expert instructor”, and those claiming to be such are guaranteed to be much further away from the imagined finishing line than they believe they are. In this case, our erstwhile “expert” is merely the chairman of the local chapter of the Driving Instructors’ Association (DIA). But let’s take a look at what the story says – it’s from those irritating This Is… local news websites who throw stories together using a food blender.
The crux of the story is that this “expert” reckons “newly qualified drivers must be kept from fast roads until they get enough experience under their belts.”
Let’s just clarify again for our “expert” the true statistics. The vast majority of accidents involving “new” drivers tick the following boxes:
driver aged 24 or under
car full of mates
at night
on rural roads
on a bend
no other car involved
Reading between the lines, you have lack of experience sitting on one side of the scales, and the belief that they know it all on the other – and the scales are heavily tipped to the latter position. Reading further into it, you also have the deplorable underlying attitude of many typical sub-24-year olds.
Our “expert” appears to be campaigning for learners to be allowed on motorways. I agree with that, but for totally different reasons. How does he think this is going to be applied to all learners? A huge number live nowhere near a motorway and couldn’t possibly do lessons on one (at best, they might get on one once for a few miles). But he is quoted:
It’s not necessarily that young people are speeding, it’s that they may be going too fast for the road circumstances.
Quite. And they do that on rural or town roads – not on motorways, where bends are gentle and general visibility of the road ahead is usually good. That’s why those statistics about accidents I gave above are so significant. What’s more, the article is in This Is Gloucestershire – a county known for the number of rural roads within in – and is part of a campaign being run by that news source commemorating the number of young drivers killed on Gloucestershire’s roads.
So the unworkable solution being suggested would have to involve keeping all new drivers off all except non-NSL (National Speed Limit) A roads.
On the other hand, of course, Gloucestershire’s appalling young driver accident record could just have something more to do with the number of rural roads it has, and the attitudes of many of its drivers. And not the fact that they haven’t been taken on motorways when they’re taking driving lessons.
Apparently, the Reservoir Road Test Centre in Hull has been closed on Health & Safety grounds after a neighbouring factory apparently experienced “a series of explosions” and “smoke from a shredding machine” caused an examiner to experience an asthma attack.
The article is in one of those “This is…” local publications and the emotive headline and reference to “explosions” is pretty vague. Even when they quote the owner of the factory where these explosions are taking place you’re still not much wiser. However, the owner explains that explosions occur inside a machine used for crushing cars a couple of times a week and are no hazard to anyone – which is at odds with the story’s initial reference to “shock waves” shaking the test centre and setting vertical blinds swinging.
Anyway, let’s leave the issue of alleged nuclear explosions in a breaker’s yard next door to the Hull test centre and look at the various responses to the temporary closure.
The story is dated today – the 11th – and yet tests appear to be going ahead until 23rd (so the whole issue can’t be that serious), after which time they will be run out of Beverley and Bridlington. Beverley is a 24 minute drive away from Hull, whilst Bridlington is 50 minutes away. Even Scunthorpe is only a 40 minute drive.
I ought to point out that I often take pupils who live in Long Eaton, for example, to tests in Colwick – a 25 minute drive at best, and often 40 minutes or more depending on the route I take. I carry out manoeuvres at various locations along whatever route we’re using, and that pushes the total travel time to anything up to 90 minutes – the warm-up time I include prior to test for all pupils..
One instructor reckons that pupils will now need two hour lessons because they will need experience of the roads they’ll be taking their tests on. He asks if they will be able to afford that. Well, the simple answer is yes, because all you do is let them miss a week and then do a two hour lesson the following week. I do that all the time with those who are strapped for cash. And he refers to a “huge fireball” erupting from the machine in the breaker’s yard – the BBC version of the story is somewhat less dramatic.
A DSA spokeswoman says:
…there is more to a test than learning test routes and it is expected that any candidate who considers themselves to be ready for test should be able to drive in any area.
That was exactly what I was thinking. Fair enough, there are certain features that it is useful to cover on lessons around any test centre, but you don’t spend all lesson, every lesson just covering test routes, test roads, test corners, and so on. Unfortunately, some ADIs do just that.
Another instructor thinks that Beverley will be “swamped by learners” and she adds:
They already have to put up with the Leconfield lorries going through their town.
The point she’s trying to make here escapes me. I’m not sure what lorries have to do with it, but I would very much doubt that even if every Hull examiner moved to Beverley and conducted all the planned Hull tests that there would be a significant increase in traffic. It would amount to a few dozen extra cars spread out over a whole day.
I wish people wouldn’t try to dramatise things so much.
Edit 10/10/2013: The latest news is that a temporary centre could open shortly – less than a month after the original office was shut.
Solomon Tweneboah, 34, has been jailed for 3 years for taking driving tests for other people. He charged £600 a time for the Theory Test and £1,000 for the Practical Test. All driving licences gained via Tweneboah have been revoked.
Tweneboah doesn’t appear to have been one of the brightest sparks in the fire. He failed to complete three attempts at bogus Theory Tests when staff became suspicious each time of the fact that he looked nothing like the photo on the provisional licences he presented. In the case of the Practical Tests, he was sussed immediately and an investigation started.
I’ve updated this article, which was originally written 3 years ago (September 2010). The subject is going through one of its periodic revivals among the ignorati across various web forums.
At the time I wrote the original, there was a story doing the rounds on these forums concerning someone who called himself Jim Kerr. He claimed he had been an examiner for 23 years, and he said:
I HAVE JUST BEEN SACKED BY THE D.S.A.. WHY? I HEAR YOU ASK.
BECAUSE, ACCORDING TO D.S.A.’S NEW “CHI” SYSTEM OF COLLECTING PASS RATES FOR EXAMINERS AT EACH TEST CENTRE, MY PASS RATE WAS HIGHER THAN THE OTHER EXAMINERS AT [named test centre] AND SO I MUST BE DOING IT WRONG.
There was much more, but that was the essence of his letter. Apparently, he’d put it into leaflet form and was handing it to people turning up for their tests outside the test centre he’d been sacked from. This act alone said a lot about the kind of person he must have been, and about the kind of person his employer had to put up with.
Anyway, when the story broke there was the deafening sound of several thousand colostomy bags all popping at the same time as ADIs logged on to the internet for their weekly surf and saw the story! You see, many in this industry sincerely believe that driving tests are rigged, and a story like this is guaranteed to get them hyperventilating. But let’s just do a reality check for a moment.
No company the size of the DSA (now known as DVSA) sacks someone on the spot for the sort of thing Kerr was claiming. They know bloody well that people like Kerr are “union” through and through, and they will only act if they’ve jumped through all the right hoops – or if they are sure of gross misconduct having been committed. What usually happens in a situation like the one Kerr is claiming is that retraining is given first of all. If that fails there will be further retraining. If that also fails then you’re into verbal warnings, written warnings, and final warnings. If there are still issues once all that has been done then dismissal is likely to follow. Companies who want to dismiss staff need a cast iron case and – except in the case of gross misconduct – a properly constructed paper trail.
Judging from the geographic location of the test centre in question, I’d be very surprised if Kerr hadn’t been in the union – and even if he wasn’t, if his claims came even close to being true he’d have been awarded a knighthood for wrongful dismissal at any tribunal! He certainly didn’t need to behave like a complete arsehole and picket the test centre to get justice.
But what about his claims? Is there any truth in them? Well, when I qualified my supervising examiner (also a test centre manager) told me this:
You’ll hear a lot of stories about quotas. They aren’t true.
What I do is monitor all my examiners, and if one of them has a significantly higher or lower variance than the rest I look into it. If we identify a problem then this is dealt with.
I am a scientist by training, and I understand maths and statistics. What my supervising examiner told me can therefore be summarised as follows (note that in this updated version I refer to a variance of 5% instead of the 10% that was being used at the time I wrote the original article):
over a period of time, with hundreds of tests conducted, you would expect every examiner to have roughly the same pass rate, give or take a few percent variance
the national average pass rate is around 45%, so over time you would expect the average pass rate for each individual examiner to be around the same figure, plus or minus a variance
if one examiner had a pass rate of say 40% and another had 45%, then it wouldn’t matter because they both fall within an acceptable band either side of the mean (i.e. ±5% variance)
if one examiner had a pass rate of, say, 20% or 60%, or if their variance was always skewed high or low, then this would point to a possible problem with the way they were conducting tests
if the anomalous pass rate continued across several monitoring periods of, say, 3 months each, then a genuine issue with the examiner’s test performance would be confirmed
Most people don’t understand maths and statistics, and they cannot accept that a single examiner consistently having a grossly different pass rate to everyone else proves that there is a problem with that examiner. Kerr appears to be one of these ignorant people, believing his distorted understanding to be some sort of epiphany. As I say, I’ve known what happens since I qualified as an instructor and it is no big deal.
Kerr obviously couldn’t understand that his higher pass rate pointed to him doing his job differently to everyone else. The update to this story shows clearly that Kerr was being a little creative with the truth, and that he had been spoken to on several occasions. He simply refused to change, believing that he – as a minority of one – was right, and that all the other examiners out there were wrong.
There is one aspect of the system the DSA uses which has always worried me, though – and it isn’t the DSA’s fault. Not directly, anyway. Imagine this perfect world scenario:
over a typical monitoring period, an examiner has a pass rate of 60% – a variance of 15% above the average for his test centre
this is flagged to the examiner by his line manager, but over the next monitoring period nothing changes
the DSA uses its internal procedure to re-train the examiner, as he is clearly passing some candidates who ought to be failing (obviously, the situation would be the same if the examiner’s pass rate was 15% below the average for the test centre, and he was failing people who ought to be passing)
That last part is totally beyond the comprehension of many ADIs (and examiners like Kerr). However, it is absolutely correct and proper: if the pass rate for the test centre in question is 45%, and if everyone else is passing/failing at around the same rate (±5% variance), then someone who is consistently passing/failing at a much higher/lower rate must doing their job wrong. It’s a simple fact.Now imagine a real world scenario to see where the trouble potentially starts:
over a monitoring period, an examiner has a pass rate of 60% – a variance of 15% above the average
this is flagged to the examiner by his line manager
the examiner fears losing his job and decides to take matters into his own hands
the examiner keeps a tally of his passes and fails, and randomly fails a few people for minor (driver) faults if he needs to bring his variance down to acceptable levels (i.e. within the ±5% acceptable variance)
There is absolutely no way that this isn’t happening somewhere out there. However, the issue is not that it is happening – but rather that there is no way to stop it. No matter what system the DSA used it would still happen in one form or another between unscrupulous examiners eager to conceal their own incompetence. Ironically, if they did their jobs properly in the first place there’d be no problem for them to try and hide, and they’d all be within the ±5% variance. In spite of all that, it is vital to understand that those examiners fiddling their results are in a tiny minority, and this in no way supports claims of “quotas” or fixed results from ADIs and disgruntled learners. Of all the many hundreds of tests my own pupils have sat, there are perhaps just two that sound a little fishy – and since I do not sit in on most tests I am only going on what the pupil has told me. There is no way that the examiners in Nottingham are unique in their overall consistency, and people like Kerr are the exception rather than the rule.
But back to Kerr’s claims. As you can imagine, this Revelation in The Gospel According To Jim Kerr is Manna From Heaven for some ADIs. One one forum alone someone opines:
I guess the reason the DSA doesnt [sic] want the contents of the leaflet published is that, they dont [sic] want us to know about their ‘variances’ or the new “chi” sytem [sic] of making sure the DE’s have to work within a certain amount of passes/fails, and how the DE’s have to comply with them. Although many ADI’s have known about it for a long time.
It’s hard to get this many contradictions and misunderstandings into two sentences… unless you’re so excited your fingers and brain are not in proper sync!
A variance is something that happens – not something you apply. If the DSA has decided that a variance of greater than ±5% indicates a problem, then that is the system being used as a quality control check. As I have already explained, if the variance is consistently outside ±5% then there is a definite problem. They can call their system whatever they like: Harriet, Tarquin… or chi. The name doesn’t alter what it is.
Do driving examiners fail people deliberately?
The short answer is NO. They do not. They are not told to fail people as part of any quota, and this applies to the vast majority of examiners throughout the UK. However, there are corrupt people in all walks of life, and as I explained above, it is possible that some examiners – a tiny percentage – will attempt fiddle their pass rates in order to avoid being “told off” by their managers.
What is the 5% variance that examiners have to keep to?
There isn’t one. The ±5% variance is something that is measured – not applied. Examiners are not told to “keep” to anything, though they are expected to perform within certain limits as a quality control measure. If any examiner is misinterpreting this and deliberately fixing their results, then they are simply being dishonest.
Are examiners told to keep their pass rates within ±5%?
No. That ±5% is a range within which each examiner’s pass rate is expected to fall, and if they’re doing their job properly in the first place then their pass rate will fall within that range. If an examiner’s pass rate consistently falls outside of the ±5% range then the DSA has internal systems which it uses to apply retraining because that examiner is not performing to an acceptable standard. Retraining is a minor issue, but less informed examiners might see it as a threat to their job security and therefore they might attempt to force the pass rate. This would be entirely the decision of the individual examiner. It is not a DSA policy.
Do quotas exist?
No. The idea of quotas is promulgated mainly by poorly educated ADIs and learners anxious to defend their poor performances on test.
What is the best day of the week to take your driving test?
There isn’t one as such. If you can drive, it doesn’t matter if you take your test on Monday morning or Friday afternoon. The idea that by Friday all the quota has been “used up” is nonsense. I’ve had lots of passes on Friday afternoons – just as I have on all other days.
Well done Sarah, who passed today first time with just 2 driver faults.After all that negativity you’ve been coming out with over the last few weeks, I have to say I told you so.
In fact, I had to force her to take her theory test as well as her practical – if I’d left it to her we’d still be taking lessons in December! But she’s been another one of those it’s been a pleasure to teach, and I am certain she’ll be a safe driver once she eventually makes her mind up over the car she wants and gets out there.
Well done Mitch, who passed today with 5 driver faults. This was his third attempt – he should have passed those other two times, but the pupils you have most faith in are often the ones who often end up doing something silly. Not this time, though. A well-deserved licence is on its way!
We had to do a circuitous route to the test centre. I heard on the news before setting out that a train had derailed in Carlton (today was the first full day the line was in operation after five weeks of closure for signal and rail upgrading). The Netherfield barriers were down and there were long delays. We managed to bypass all that – but reports are that the damaged line could take many days to repair, and also the new signals have been damaged.
voiceovers, or Practical Driving Tests using an interpreter. This action follows the consultation carried out earlier this year, the results of which can be read here.
Well done Bryn, who passed first time today with just 5 driver faults. He shared the same sense of humour as me – sarcasm – especially when he’d done something wrong, so he’s been a great pupil to teach. We’ve had a lot of laughs.
I’m a bit late putting this up, but well done Matthew, who passed first time on Friday with just 3 driver faults. He’s been a nice guy to teach – and we got that serious case of “bungee leg” under control, after all!
instructor”.
series of explosions” and “smoke from a shredding machine” caused an examiner to experience an asthma attack.
Well done Sarah, who passed today first time with just 2 driver faults.After all that negativity you’ve been coming out with over the last few weeks, I have to say I told you so.
Well done Mitch, who passed today with 5 driver faults. This was his third attempt – he should have passed those other two times, but the pupils you have most faith in are often the ones who often end up doing something silly. Not this time, though. A well-deserved licence is on its way!