Category - DSA

An alert from the DSA, but also covered by the media in general, reports that dangerous drivers who cause serious injury could face longer jail sentences.

A new offence – causing serious injury by dangerous driving – will attract a sentence of up to five years imprisonment. At the moment, the most a judge can give is two years, unless the offence results in death, in which case the maximum is 14 years. This new offence fills the very large gap that has been a get-out clause for many a boy or girl racer for a good few years now.

Of course, we mustn’t forget that it isn’t just young people who destroy peoples’ lives by driving dangerously.

On the other hand, we also mustn’t forget that driving like a prat is still detestable, even if it doesn’t result in injury.

This is an old story. DSA is now DVSA.

A story appeared a few days ago on the BBC website about a driving examiner in Devon, who claimed she was bullied over her pass rate.

Nicola Bentley-Lovell made a claim of constructive dismissal against the DSA. She’d worked as an examiner for seven years up until October 2010 but resigned after she allegedly had to take a lot of “bullying and harassment” over her pass rate.

She said that over a six-year period she underwent 165 internal check tests (the normal check rate in that period would have been a maximum of around 50 per examiner).

She claims that her managers “urged her to increase her pass rate” as it was below “acceptable variance”.

You can read the full story in that link – it is bulked out with a variety of claims that are not directly connected with the issue of variance.

At this point, the forums lit up with the usual crowd of fossils and know-it-alls – idiotic claims about people always failing tests on a Friday, accusations that they get cash bonuses for meeting targets, and so on. Hard to believe many of these people can get away with calling themselves “professionals”.

What shut them up rather quickly was the subsequent story a few days later – also on the BBC – that the examiner had lost her case of unfair or constructive dismissal.

Now, I’ve written about variances before. There was a case where a Scottish ex-examiner was moaning about how his bosses wanted his pass rate to come down! He also had a gripe over “variances”.

What is clear is that a lot of people – examiners like these two, and plenty of ADIs who persist in their archaic careers solely to hate the DSA – do not have a clue what variances actually are.

If you toss a coin, it is 50:50 whether it will be heads or tails. In theory, if you toss it a hundred times, you should get 50 heads and 50 tails. In reality, you might get 45 heads and 55 tails – or the other way round… or anywhere in between. Or even a bit different.

What you won’t get is 80 heads and 20 tails. And even if you did, you wouldn’t get the same again, and you certainly wouldn’t get it if you upped the tosses to 1,000 or 10,000.

The same is true of examiners. No matter what happens, in theory only a certain percentage of test candidates will pass, and it is not 100% of them. So if you have on perfect examiner conducting all tests, you would end up with a pass rate somewhere around 40%. That’s just the way it is – that 40% is the equivalent of the 50:50 of coin tossing.

Arguably, if all ADIs were perfect and taught to a perfect standard, and this one perfect examiner took all the tests, then the pass rate would theoretically be 100%. But you don’t have perfect ADIs, you don’t have perfect pupils, and you don’t have perfect examiners.

What you do have are typical human beings who are affected by typical human defects. Variances, if you like. And that’s where the 40% comes from.

Now, if you tossed that coin a hundred times and it came down 80 heads, would you think there was something wrong with it? Well, I would. And if the same thing happened for the next hundred tosses, I’d be certain. And if it kept happening, I’d use a different coin next time.

But the problem appears to be that some people wouldn’t see this as an issue and would reject any attempt to fix the coin so that it came down 50:50 like it should do. And this is exactly what keeps happening with these examiners who keep going on about variances, and the ignorant ADIs anxious to believe the worst.

If an examiner has a pass rate which is not the equivalent of 50:50 for a coin toss test (or 40% in their case), or within reasonable limits (95-105% of that 40%), then they are not performing to the required standard – just like the coin that keeps giving 80 heads in every hundred tosses!

Both examiners in these publicised cases appeared too stupid to realise this simple fact.

If someone is on your case for six years – giving you every opportunity to examine what you do – you have to be a very special kind of person not to be able to realise something is up. And you need to be extra-special to conclude that you – out of hundreds and hundreds of other examiners – are not doing something wrong.

The Peterborough Evening Telegraph reports that Ewa Petelska, 46, failed her Part 3 exam in November 2009, but she gave paid-for lessons to four Polish pupils over the subsequent five months. She was found guilty of giving paid instruction by an unregistered and unlicensed person.

You really need to read the story several times to convince yourself that she’s actually been punished. All that appears to have happened is that she must pay back part of the money she took from the learners she taught. Although she wasn’t charged with it, it is highly likely that she wasn’t insured – or her learners weren’t – when out on these lessons.

Petelska actually comes out of it looking better than the DSA. Her defence lawyer said:

…[she] had provided a vital service to Polish learners.

“She has not been convicted of any offences in the past and she is not likely to appear before the court again.

“She accepts she made an error, but there is no suggestion she posed a risk on the roads.

“She has four children, aged between seven and 25, who live in Poland and she sends money to them.

“She wants to work as a driving instructor in the future, but may not be able to because of this conviction.”

Well, at least we didn’t get the usual “she’s pregnant”, “her mother or father or brother or sister or friend recently died”, or that she was “seeking to come to terms with some personal crisis”. That’s the usual way to get off lightly.

Petelska was given an 18-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay back £1,318 to her pupils. Plus she was ordered to pay court costs of £85.

It makes you wonder why the DSA’s Fraud & Integrity people even bother. They’ve not recovered any significant costs (you and me will have to pay for that one way or another), whereas Petelska has come out with a glowing reference.

And since she is a non-national she, I wouldn’t bet against her making it on to the Register of ADIs at some point in the future.

A while back – just over a year ago, in fact – there was a story involving the DSA having had to change the wording on its website. It had previously claimed that Pass Plus reduced someone’s chances of having an accident, but statistics could not confirm this claim and it had to reword accordingly.

Well, this story in the North West Evening Mail flies right in the face of that.

It seems that government spending cuts had threatened the region’s Pass Plus + scheme with the impending withdrawal of the National Road Safety Grant. But Cumbria County Council has stepped in and is funding the scheme itself, which means each young driver gets £100-worth of free tuition.

That’s not the thing that caught my attention, though. What did that was this comment in the article:

Statistics have shown a sharp fall in accidents in Cumbria since Pass Plus+ was rolled out in the county in 2007.

That’s a very clear statement, isn’t it?

As I’ve said before, Pass Plus is only as good as the instructor delivering it. If it is a “crap course”, the reason for that is therefore obvious.

An email alert from the DSA has just arrived and it says that later this month, new learning materials will be available for those taking the theory test from January 2012.

This was originally announced in 2010 – it was mentioned in the December 2010 issue of Despatch, and first announced in late October 2010. A lot of people – including instructors – seem not to be aware of it even in late 2011.

In a nutshell, the DSA will no longer be publishing the question bank in an effort to stop people just learning the answers by rote. In a way, it is a throwback to when I did my test many years ago, where you learnt the Highway Code and applied it. Sadly, in just the same way that general secondary education has gone down the route of trying to make it easier for people to pass exams by making the test easier rather than improving the educational system (and then boasting about how good everyone is every Summer, after record A*** (or however many stars they use) grades), so the driving test went the same way over the last 30 years or so.

There are already bad noises coming from the usual agitators, but it is an excellent idea by the DSA.

These new learning materials – books, CDs, and DVDs – will contain example questions, but not the actual ones used on test.

EDIT: The most recent DSA news update says the change comes into force from 23 January 2012.