I noticed on another forum that someone is likening ‘making adequate progress’ on test with ‘driving like a prat with no regard for anyone else’. It appears to be a contrivance, engineered to have a go at the DSA.
Let me just make something absolutely clear. On test, if a pupil is in a 30mph zone and they’re driving consistently at 25mph or less, then they are going too slow and are holding people up. In a 40mph zone, they need to be doing 35mph or more for the same reason. In a 50mph zone, 40mph at the least. In a 60mph zone, above 50mph. And in a 70mph zone, above 60mph. These figures are approximate and should not be interpreted otherwise.
Under absolutely no circumstances is this ‘speeding’ or an example of the DSA encouraging reckless behaviour. It does not ‘instill speed’ in peoples minds. Indeed, if the pupil doesn’t slow down for hazards and junctions, he or she will soon find themselves booking another test for another try.
In order to be a complete driver, you need to know how to drive at the speed limit – not to be afraid of it, with all the extra hazards such fear would introduce to someone’s driving style. Driving 20mph below the limit when there’s no need leads to road rage and increases the risk of accidents. It’s shocking that ADIs should be advocating such behaviour.
Cancellation of identity cards: changes to ID requirements
The government has passed legislation cancelling identity cards for British citizens. From 21 January 2011, those identity cards that have already been issued will no longer be legal forms of identification.
This means you’ll no longer be able to use the identity card as a valid document to prove your identity for a practical driving test or for Driver CPC periodic training.
If you don’t have a photo card licence and counterpart to prove your identity but have an old-style paper one, you must bring this and a valid passport.
For more information about the cancellation of identity cards visit direct.gov.uk/identity.
This Mickey Mouse government has got a few people angry at its petty cancellation of the ID card scheme (i.e. just because it was a Labour idea). People paid money for the things, and they aren’t happy that they are not to be compensated for the loss of the privileges the ID card brought them.
Just following on from that earlier post about the DSA Eco-Safe Driving video on YouTube, and my suggestion to look at some of the comments.
…I posted a honest an truthful,but critical response to this and of course it was not approved! Free speech, just like? most of our other liberties are being eroded away by large or corporate organisations.
I wish I’d seen that. YouTube comments usually contain every swear word known to mankind – and nothing else! The DSA moderator’s answer to the original person whose comments were not approved says:
Hi – just to quickly explain our moderation? policy. We check all comments for offensive language before they are published. Comments with no offensive language are published – but it can take a couple of hours from you posting a comment to it being approved.
So, all comments are published as long as there is no offensive language. Clearly, in at least one case, there was offensive language. Some people really do need to read up on the concept of free speech!
But the original complainer doesn’t learn:
Absolute joke. Corporate DSA once again? trying to validate their salaries. Even the stop start technology is a complete waste of time/money/bulls**t co2 propaganda. That’s if you believe in man made co2 .Most well balanced scientist cant agree! Not the paid by Government scientist that will say anything to justify their own budgets. The new test is now actually easier through indi driving. Forget where your going!! Just ASK! one less maneuver also!! Great!!
He must get very frustrated with no one taking him seriously, I wonder if he will ever realise why?
I must admit that I also disagree with the DSA eco-advice about switching off the engine when stopped at traffic lights. The only places I think it is worthwhile are:
at level crossings
at temporary lights when you KNOW they are going to be on red for a long time (those multi-way ones they sometimes set up)
in a traffic jam where you can see the traffic is going nowhere soon
anything similar to the above
It is crazy turning a normal engine off at normal traffic lights. Some lights only let a couple of cars through, and messing about at those is going to really annoy people. On top of that, many people’s cars are likely to not fire up first time (if at all), and that is going to be much more eco-unfriendly than just letting it idle.
New powers to tackle uninsured driving will come into force within months, Road Safety Minister Mike Penning announced today.
Under the new powers it will be an offence to keep an uninsured vehicle, rather than just to drive when uninsured.
Currently every responsible motorist pays an average £30 each year within their premiums to cover crashes involving uninsured and untraced drivers. It is also estimated that uninsured and untraced drivers kill 160 people and injure 23,000 every year.
Mike Penning said:
“Uninsured drivers push up premiums for other motorists and often drive with no regard for other road users, so it is vital that we do everything we can to keep them off the roads.
“More than 400 uninsured vehicles are already being seized by the police every day but it is simply not possible to catch every uninsured driver in this way. That is why we are bringing in these new powers which will help us to take targeted action while freeing up police time to deal with the hard core of offenders.”
Ashton West, Chief Executive at the Motor Insurers’ Bureau, said:
“Today’s news marks a significant step forward in the fight against uninsured driving. This means that as enforcement can take place for both keeping and driving a vehicle without insurance there will be no place for illegal motorists to hide.
“Continuous Insurance Enforcement (CIE) will complement and run alongside existing police roadside enforcement, which has already reduced uninsured driving by 20 per cent.”
Under the new system:
the DVLA will work in partnership with the Motor Insurers’ Bureau to identify uninsured vehicles
motorists will receive a letter telling them that their vehicle appears to be uninsured and warning them that they will be fined unless they take action
if the keeper fails to insure the vehicle they will be given a £100 fine
if the vehicle remains uninsured – regardless of whether the fine is paid – it could then be seized and destroyed
Vehicles with a valid Statutory Off Road Notice (SORN) will not be required to be insured.
The Department for Transport today made the Commencement Order to make it an offence to be the registered keeper of a vehicle which does not have insurance, as well as regulations to support this. Further regulations will be made shortly, allowing the scheme to come into force in the Spring.
I agree wholeheartedly with cracking down on uninsured drivers.
The Driving Standards Agency (DSA) has published a new video on its YouTube channel about eco-safe driving.
Watch the video for tips on how to be an eco-safe driver and contribute to road safety as well as reducing your fuel consumption and vehicle emissions.
The forums have been aglow over recent months on the subject of coaching. It’s quite funny how people think just substituting a word in their waffle suddenly makes them brilliant coaches. Suddenly “I teach people to drive” has become “I coach people to drive”. The irony is that many of them probably don’t do either very well, but it doesn’t stop them using the “C” word in every other sentence.
Some of them might actually be coaching very well, but for most I doubt that they’d recognise coaching if it came and cocked its leg against them.
If anyone asks me what I do, I tell them:
I’m a driving instructor
I teach people to drive
I refuse point blank to use the C word. I had a skinful of it when I was working in the rat race, and it makes my skin crawl now when I hear it. But am I right to feel that way?
A huge part of the problem seems to be that the same kind of people who used to make me hurl when I was in the rat race have started hijacking the coaching issue as it pertains to driving instruction. To that end, they are running around telling everyone what coaching is and what it involves:
communication skills
interpersonal skills
building relationships
create connections
psychological techniques
promoting change
expand contacts
clean language
emergent knowledge
unconscious resources
negative/positive self-belief
personality types
life coaching
performance coaching
self-marketing
body language
inner confidence
This just goes on and on, depending on who you listen to. Phrases like inner confidence and life coaching make me shudder. They’re pure bullshit.
EDIT 24/7/2012: I just want to add something I read recently where a trainer claims – in answer to the question about how to develop a lesson structure – that the following are essential for assessing how a pupil learns:
V.A.K.
Behaviourism i.e. Classical Conditioning
Constructivism – Piaget, Vygotsky
Humanism – Hierarchy of needs (Maslow)
Kolbs learning cycle
Co-operative learning
Cognitive acceleration
I’ve mentioned the rat race a few times. This is exactly the kind of total and utter bullshit we had to deal with. And make no mistake about it – that’s exactly what it is. It’s the equivalent of charging people to breath air. When someone starts spouting this nonsense, their true colours are suddenly and painfully exposed.
The person who quoted these cannot give any real world examples of their use. and application. Merely listing them is supposed to initiate the sharp intake of admiring breaths from those who read it. Or not, as the case may be.
The DSA hasn’t actually said what it expects by way of coaching, and all these ADIs who are allegedly “doing it all the time” – even when they’re in a coma – seem very reluctant to give examples of precisely how they coach when pressed to do so. The reason for that is simple: they haven’t got a clue what coaching is.
They also forget that the DSA is going to take the most direct route possible, and it isn’t likely to require ADIS to gain aromatherapy and crystallography diplomas from the local Clown College in order to remain on the register.
It goes without saying that the GDE Matrix is involved in this – purely because the Clown College life skills department has got hold of it, looked at the table in the back, and seen a way of making shedloads of money out of it. it. But does the Matrix actually agree with those Cuckoo Club Coaches, who seem to believe that levitation, time-travel, and healing hands are mandatory skills for someone who teaches – sorry, coaches – people to drive?
Well, the GDE Matrix Report everyone is referring to (download it by clicking the links above) says that driver behaviour follows this “hierarchical model” – or in plain English, when someone goes out driving their overall performance is governed by these things in order:
car control ability (speed, direction, position, etc.)
handling real situations (junctions, other cars, etc.)
purpose and nature of the journey
general attitudes towards driving and life in general
Just about any ADI will be handling the first three with every pupil they teach. If they aren’t, they shouldn’t be on the Register. We teach them how to handle the car, how to handle road layouts and various traffic conditions, and things which might cause distraction or increase the risk of an accident. Any ADI who isn’t covering these things simply isn’t doing their job properly.
Addressing the 4th item is the one which apparently needs a Clown College diploma in something which mankind has not managed to solve in all of recorded history, and which it is unlikely to solve anytime in the future. In plain English, it is the way the average person behaves generally in their life, and how this carries over into how he or she drives.
As an example, if you have someone who spent their entire time at school pretending to be black in spite of being a pasty white colour (i.e. wearing a stupid baseball cap), plus a shell suit or Burberry clobber, cheap bling, BMX bike, no taste in music, their whole evenings hanging around outside the chip shop smoking, spitting, and swearing at people who walk past, and who was known to the police from about 10 minutes after he was born because of who his parents were, well, that person just might be tempted to drive in an inappropriate manner when he passes his test and buys a Corsa with 4-inch exhaust pipe and blacked out windows. His whole life to that point has conditioned him.
[Some idiot from Manchester has taken issue with this analogy, and thinks it is offensive to black people. It’s supposed to be a swipe at youngwhite people! Slightly built, pasty white youths who dress like rap stars and have rubbish music blaring out of their stereos and who behave antisocially are already a long way away from likely being influenced by a bit of coaching from an instructor. Anyone who has to pretend to be something they aren’t (hence, a white person pretending to be black, when the cap just doesn’t fit) has already got issues. And like it or not, they exist in large numbers out there, which is why I used this example.]
Doesn’t that make you slap your head and go “Of course! It all makes sense now!”
But it gets better, because apparently the one thing that’s been missing from the equation – and which could prevent this unfortunate situation arising – is the role of the Driving Instructor!
Let’s get rid of the Clown College mystique a moment and remind ourselves that “GDE” stands for Goals for Driver Education. The following table is what many people refer to as “The GDE Matrix” or, as it calls itself, “The GDE Framework”. It is basically just a more complicated version of the 4 items listed above, using university-speak to make itself look important. Oh, yes! And it’s upside-down.
Knowledge and Skill
Risk Increasing Aspects
Self-assessment
Goals for life, skills for driving
Lifestyle, age, group norms, motives, self-control, values
Sensation seeking, group norms, complying with peer pressure
Risky tendencies, own preconditions, impulse control
Goals and context of driving
Modal choice, choice of time, trip goals, social pressure
Alcohol, fatigue, purpose of driving, rush hours, competing
A typical young driver who is being taught properly – and that isn’t just by his ADI, but through his schooling and via his parents and friends – will gradually progress across this, starting at the bottom left and finishing top right, but taking in all the other things along the way. Remember that at this stage of the report, all that this table is doing is telling you how someone who is being taught properly learns. It’s telling you something most people already know but which they never had to think about. It’s really just stating the obvious.
The report then goes on to make some recommendations:
An Integrated Driver Education Approach (IDEA) is recommended, where structured professional methods are combined with accompanied practicing.
Translation: We suggest that people should be taught by driving instructors and also get private practice to supplement what they are taught.
Training should start in a structured way from the lowest levels of the driving hierarchy and then continue to allow drivers to learn these skills automatic with an accompanying person.
Translation: We suggest that training should start with the basics, and then people can practice these basics privately with an accompanying driver.
Integrated approach is especially important for the youngest learner drivers before allowing them independent access to traffic.
Translation: Young drivers are at greatest risk.
Integrated approach increases the demands for professional instructors and thus, training of traffic instructors should be improved.
This is where it starts to get scary – and it’s the one the Clown College graduates have gotten hold of. It goes on:
Knowledge on motivational and social aspects of driving (not only technical skill)
Skills for dealing with lay-supervisors
Guiding lay-supervisors in efficient teaching
Translation: Driving Instructors should involve the supervising drivers.
Accompanied driving should include a minimum amount of driving and also a structure and methods to control it.
Translation: Private practice shouldn’t be pointless and allow bad habits to develop.
Interventions of professionals after the accompanied driving phase should support risk awareness and self-evaluation, rather than being technically oriented.
Translation: It’s attitude that leads to accidents.
The process of the integrated driver education approach does not necessarily have to exceed two years for example.
This is where that media story which has taken various forms over the last 5 years about the minimum driving age being raised came from.
Professional driver education should be available to persons who do not have the possibility to follow the integrated approach.
Translation: If someone can’t do private practice, ignore all the stuff we just said and just take lessons with an instructor.
Giving more structure to the training could effectively reduce unnecessary examinations.
Translation: Better training might result in better pass rates.
Although it comes close to the subject – worryingly close if you don’t understand it – it definitely stops short of suggesting that driving instructors should aim to repair inadequate parenting or schooling by turning hooligans into saints.
In fact, the only things the definitive GDE Matrix report does say are just blindingly obvious! It makes it sound all high-falutin’, but it is just stating the obvious.
The DSA is currently running a Learning To Drive study, where they are trialing a new syllabus for possible implementation in the next few years. Undoubtedly there will be some elements of coaching in it, but I suspect the main thrust will be the content. It isn’t going to require that instructors become psychoanalysts – that’s just the stupid interpretation that some have given to the GDE Matrix table.
Like most things in this industry, what some ADIs believe (or want to believe) will be light years away from what really happens.
In the meantime, the Life Coaches are having a ball persuading vulnerable instructors to attend pointless and expensive Clown courses.
Registration and non statutory test fee increases from 4 January 2011
The following registration and non statutory test fees have increased today due to the VAT change:
Registration for large goods vehicle instructors
Registration and test fees for fleet driver trainers
Registration to join the post-test register of motorcycle trainers
Please visit the Business Link website for a list of all fee increases effective from 4 January 2011, including the Cardington special tests for driving and motorcycle instructors.
This story has been covered in the press – I saw it in today’s Sunday Mirror, and it is also covered by Autoblog. It concerns various websites which charge a premium priced for booking theory and practical driving tests – apparently the AA has complained to the Office Of Fair Trading (OFT).
The thing is, some sites are definitely scams – they deliberately fool people into paying money and they provide nothing in return, not even a test booking in some cases.
The ones that charge a premium price and deliver what they offer aren’t really scams. What they’re doing is highly immoral, particularly if they conceal the fact they are not official sites (and most of them do), but they are still providing a service – albeit of questionable value.
I’m not defending them – I think they are wrong - but we need to be clear on what is actually happening and not just keep labelling things we don’t like as “scams”. After all, stealing money from someone is not the same as overcharging them. It’s similar, but not the same.
But the overall message is this…
BOOK YOUR TEST ONLY VIA THE DSA WEBSITE
DO NOT BOOK IT USING ANYONE ELSE
ALL YOU CAN GET IS A TEST BOOKING – THERE IS NOTHING “EXTRA”, SO DON’T PAY EXTRA IF SOMEONE OFFERS IT
THE THEORY TEST IS EASY - DON’T PAY SOMEONE TO HELP YOU
A SIMPLE DVD COSTING AROUND £6 WILL HELP MORE THAN THEY CAN
Use the DSA’s site, and only the DSA’s site – see the links on the Information page.
The DSA has introduced a CAPTCHA system on its booking pages, designed to inhibit automated test checking and booking.
YouTube video: Driving tests in bad weather – what you need to do
DSA has published a new video on YouTube so driving test candidates know what they need to do if there’s snow or ice in their area on the day of their practical driving test.
If you run your own website, you can embed the video, or share it on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Watch the video on YouTube
I’ve fixed the link to YouTube – the one in the email is completely messed up and doesn’t work.
The video sound quality is terrible on speakers – why they chose to film it outside Nottingham Castle next to all the traffic is anyone’s guess. I can’t even figure out why it is a video at all – probably something to do with the target group, I’d guess.
Here’s a basic summary:
the service the DSA offers can be disrupted by bad weather
for safety reasons, they do not do practical driving tests in snow & ice
read your appointment letter/email and do what it says
phone the test centre on the day of the test only if there is snow or ice
call about 2 hours before your test
it might take several tries because examiners might be out checking the roads
if you have an early morning test, call as early as you can because they won’t know that it is cancelled the day before
the test covers all types of roads, so just because the main roads near you are clear, side roads might still be icy, and that is why tests cannot go ahead
they realise it is disappointing if your test is cancelled but they don’t do it without good reason
your test is rearranged automatically and you won’t be charged for it
the new date will usually come through within 3 working days, but it could take up to 7 working days during long spells of bad weather
they are trying to keep test waiting times down, but if the bad weather continues it might lead to longer waiting times in some areas
I would just add that some test centres are highly realistic and CAN cancel tests the day before.
You might also want to consider the option where it is icy where you are but the test centre says your test will be going ahead – make sure you explain this to them clearly, but just accept that if it is 12ºC at the test centre then it’s unlikely to get you anywhere.
The weather conditions at the moment are appalling. I doubt that driving examiners want cancelled tests any more than instructors do (well, certainly no more than anyone else wants to be kept off work because of the weather: it’s fun for a day or two, then it gets boring).
Many test centres are tucked away on industrial estates, so the roads don’t get gritted as a priority. The temperature has been below freezing (many degrees below in some cases) for days on end. Snowfall – particularly in Scotland – has been extremely severe. The second wave of bad weather came before the last remnants of snow from the previous one had fully cleared up. And so it goes on.
So, it might come as a surprise (on the other hand, knowing the mentalities of some instructors it comes almost as no surprise at all) to discover that examiners are being criticised for not going out on tests.
On one forum, one poster says:
You guessed it – 3rd test in a row cancelled!!
…Today has been very cold and remnants of a little snow and ice about but the council have done a great job of keeping the roads clear – That said DSA still chose not to take tests out.
Of course, he fails to mention that “very cold” means -5°C or less (it was -9°C here). And he expects the DSA to conduct tests where even the salty run-off has frozen solid.
Another one adds:
Went to our test centre yesterday morning, it was locked up, no cars, no lights. So clearly they all took a days leave.
To which there is the reply:
Nice to have a monopoly.
Then there is one of the best inadvertent attempts at comedy I’ve seen for a while:
The examiners could clear the car parks with spades and salt and conduct bay parks then leave the roads for driving.
Yes, that would be great. Then they could all go and melt the ice on the roads outside the test centre. Perhaps by breathing on it. And the same poster adds in another post:
Have a test [today], but because i have this Swine Flu I dont want to go if I dont have to.
If you’ve got swine flu, buddy, you’re a menace going out and interacting with anyone.
And a more direct attempt at humour (“attempt” being the operative word):
Xmnrs 3 dart average is 180.
You can see why we class ourselves as “professionals”, can’t you?
I noticed on another forum that someone is likening ‘making adequate progress’ on test with ‘driving like a prat with no regard for anyone else’. It appears to be a contrivance, engineered to have a go at the DSA.
The forums have been aglow over recent months on the subject of coaching. It’s quite funny how people think just substituting a word in their waffle suddenly makes them brilliant coaches. Suddenly “I teach people to drive” has become “I 
It isn’t exactly new. The