Well done Sarah, who passed yesterday with 10 driver faults. It was her second test with me, but her eighth attempt overall!
Sarah’s biggest problem has been her nerves – she had been prescribed beta blockers and I made sure she took them for her test. She can drive, but she easily gets distracted by making things too complicated or overthinking them (as we walked into the test centre she asked which way she should drive to go out of the car park – I just said not to drive through a wall, because there was only one way in or out, and we’d just used it). On both her tests, I got texts late the previous evening asking things that weren’t important.
To be honest, I think the reason she hadn’t passed previously is that she’d had instructors who merely pandered to her nerves instead of trying to deal with them. I focused on the fact that she could drive, and built her confidence up from there.
Another milestone is that this was the first time I have had anyone in floods of tears – and I mean hard tears – because they passed. It meant that much to her. And she admitted that the possibility of passing, this time or in any future test, had not occurred to her.