Note the age of this article. Prices were correct at the time (5Day are still going, but as of 2022 the fees are almost double what they were in 2016).
I saw someone refer to this on a forum and looked the company up. I must stress that the following comments are my own opinion.
What 5Day is offering is an intensive driving course which lasts for – no surprise – 5 days. The words that will leap out and burn themselves into the brains of the people likely to apply are:
…cost effective theory and practical tuition that will allow an individual to learn to drive within 5 days… If you don’t manage to pass your theory or practical tests you will receive free, unlimited retraining to help you improve.
I’m sure that 5Day are aware of this, and that the various conditions they apply will be overlooked by many applicants.
First of all, there is the cost of the course – £964 (they use the adverb “only”) . The theory and practical tests – just one attempt at each – are included in that, which means that the training itself is valued at £879. The training is done between 9am and 5pm, and this includes theory test training. It is necessary to make a few assumptions here, but if there is one hour of theory training and one hour for lunch, and if the rest of the time is in-car (which is perhaps a little generous), that means the pupil will be doing 5 hours of training each day – a total of 20 hours.
If we also assume that theory test tuition is valued at the same rate as driving tuition (also generous), and lunch hours have no monetary value, driving lessons are being charged at a rate of over £35 per hour! I doubt that the pupil will actually be driving for 5 hours in a stretch – there will have to be breaks – so the actual lesson rate is probably even more than that.
Then we come to the conditions and small print. First of all, 5Day says that theory tests are pre-arranged to take place during the course. I guess they can risk that claim, because booking a theory test only has a short waiting time (though if someone booked a short-notice course, I wonder how they’d handle that). They then go on to say:
…once [the theory test is] passed, 5DAY™ will assist you in applying for your priority practical driving test. 5DAY™ guarantee to secure the test 75% sooner than the DVSA waiting list.
Now, in many places in the country the waiting time for tests is very long, and the subject of much controversy. DVSA is trying to address the problem. Here in Nottingham, for example, anyone booking a test today (29 February) will get a date in early June at Beeston, and mid-June at Colwick. That’s more than 14 weeks away. As I look at all test centres in my area – that’s Beeston, Colwick, Clifton, and Watnall – there is one cancellation/available slot for Watnall this Saturday and nothing else for any of the others until June. I’ve been actively looking for cancellations for pupils for the last few months and they simply don’t come up very often. Even so, the “75% sooner” claimed by 5Day would make the typical wait for a test approximately four weeks, and with no guarantees of even that.
That’s hardly the “Learn to drive in just 5DAYs” they claim on their website home page. It’s more like “complete the course in 5 days, then take the test in anywhere between a couple of days later if you’re lucky and can attend it at such short notice, and 14 weeks if you’re not”. People who sign up for this will be drawn in by the “5 days” hook and end up disappointed – it’s how bad reputations start.
If you book a course which is more than four weeks in the future then there is a non-refundable £200 deposit required – though the balance is required no less than four weeks before the course commences. You’d need to be a bit careful there, since if you booked today for a session starting on 4 April you’d have to pay £200 immediately – and another £764 before next Monday! If you didn’t, you’d lose £200 and not get on the course (that’s what their conditions are saying).
5Day has centres in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Peterborough, Bristol, Norwich, and three around London. Many people will need to pay for at least four – probably five – nights of accommodation. You can slap another £150-£250 on the price for that.
If you fail either of the tests, you will have to pay for further tests. The additional “unlimited” training is free but since it is outside of the “5 day” window you’ll have to consider how you would complete such training. You may need further hotel stays, or possibly travel costs, if the re-training isn’t residential. They don’t say what form this re-training takes, and I doubt that it is “intensive”. And you will have to pay for the “hire” of a car for the test – they don’t mention anywhere how much that would be, but assume at least £50, which would mean each re-test day would cost you at least £112.
The detailed conditions state that you might not go to test in the car you were training in.
Now we come to the all-important disclaimer:
The 5DAY course is designed to give an average pupil an overall grounding on all the topics of the DSA learning to drive syllabus and to help a pupil achieve if possible DSA test standard by the end of the 5 Days. There is no guarantee implied written or otherwise that a pupil will get to the required standard to be able to pass a driving test as achieving this standard is entirely down to the pupils ability.
This seems to go completely against the gist of their homepage, where it says:
Learn to drive in just 5DAYs… With our 5DAY intensive driving course… There really is no quicker, easier or safer way to get your full driving licence.
Let’s digress to discuss the implications of this.
Even an above-average pupil would find it difficult to concentrate for more than 2 hours of driving at a time. Even with an hour break, a further 2 hours of driving would be less productive than the first two. Doing this for five days on the trot would be less productive still. I will admit that there is a very small number of people at any one time who might be able to handle it, but the vast majority couldn’t. It is a simple fact.
Going further, the official average number of hours taken to learn to drive by someone who hasn’t driven before is around 40-50 hours with an instructor, plus 20 hours or more of private practice. The quickest I’ve ever had anyone go from zero to test pass is 14½ hours (1st time pass). I’ve had another do it in 17½ hours (1st time pass), several in under 25 hours (1st time passes, some with no private practice), the majority in 25-40 hours (one to several attempts), and a fair number in 40-60 hours (ditto). The most hours any of my pupils has taken is 160 (3rd time pass). And one did over 100 hours with me (no test taken) until I finally persuaded her to switch to automatic, whereupon she did around another 100 hours (7th time pass – and has since given up driving because she had too many accidents). Obviously, I have had many who could already drive and just needed a bit of a wash and brush up – sometimes only having a single lesson – but I haven’t included these.
In other words, only two have done it in under 20 hours. I reckon that’s considerably less than 5% of those I’ve taught from scratch.
What about intensive courses? Well, I don’t offer them anymore, and here’s why. A long time ago someone contacted me for an intensive course – 20 hours over four days, with his test the next day. He’d never driven before, and after the first session it was apparent he was not a quick learner. We’d arranged the lessons so that he did 2 hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and two more in the evening, with a 2 hour break between each session. Each day went from the good (in the morning), through the bad, and finished with the ugly (in the evening)! Each of the three lesson days also followed a similar pattern. And he failed his test. A couple of months later he contacted me again, and we did the same – 20 hours over four days. It all followed the same pattern, and he again failed his test. I felt terrible, he felt terrible – and that was the end of intensives for me. They simply cannot be relied on to work.
When I think back to him I can’t help but think of the very real dangers of putting such people on the roads if they should manage to get lucky and scrape a pass. It’s hardly “safe driving for life”, is it? I also wonder about the moral implications – over the last few years I’ve had several people pass, some of them first time, who I worry about as a result of what they were capable of on lessons. You get to know them and you know that a test pass doesn’t always tell the full story (one dyspraxic pupil was capable of the strangest actions).
Going back to what 5Day is offering, only a small percentage of the learner population stands a decent chance of passing in 20 hours – and it would still cost them considerably more £1,000 overall to do it. The same pupils could take normal lessons and pass by spending considerably less than half that amount, and when you consider that 5Day cannot guarantee a quicker pass due to test waiting times you have to wonder what the pupil is actually paying for. For the more average pupil, they might end up taking any number of tests at £62 a pop, with vehicle hire of at least £50 per test. They could end up spending closer to £1,500 – around double what it would cost them to do it normally. For below average pupils… well, how long is a piece of string? 5Day’s offer isn’t quite the “exceptional quality, cost effective theory and practical tuition” it first appears to be, is it?
I emphasise again that these are my opinions and my own experiences. Comments about 5Day’s course are based on their own freely available information and conditions, and I only comment on the nature of intensive courses based on their relation to normal training.