It’s funny, but I keep seeing instructors claiming on forums and social media that they all still teach turn in the road (TIR) and reversing around a corner (RRC). I mean, 99% of them are all doing it, same as they ever were.
For anyone who doesn’t know, DVSA stopped testing these manoeuvres in December 2017.
Before then, instructors would be queuing up to use corners that the examiners used. There’d sometimes be three or more cars waiting to muscle their way in (I’ve written several times about how I’d “had words” with the prats who’d tried it when I was somewhere with a pupil and they’d got in my way). A lot of them would spend a full hour there, boring their pupils witless with try after try. Right now, the only time there are any problems is in car parks used by examiners for bay parking. All the old, favourite corners and quiet roads for turning have tumbleweed blowing across them.
So I’m wondering where they’re doing these manoeuvres now, because it sure as hell isn’t in the places I go – and I travel significant distances with my pupils. I reckon I’ve seen two cars having a go in the last year – and they were private runners or PDIs by the look of them. There must be some mythical place out there, like the “elephants’ graveyard”, where all these instructors are when they reckon they’re still covering them.
I show my pupils how to do those old manoeuvres once or twice, so if something happens on their test (or once they’ve passed) and they have to turn around they’ll at least be able to physically do it (and that has happened a couple of times on tests). I bring it in sneakily, by wanting to turn round and go back the way we came for some reason, pointing out afterwards that “that used to be on the test”. That way, they realise what they’d use it for without worrying about the finer details too much, and it means they can’t accuse me of teaching them things “they don’t need”. But there’s no point spending hours on it so they can do the original ultra-polished pre-2018 test version.
What annoys me, though, is that DVSA took TIR and RRC out of the test in the first place. It was bloody obvious that instructors would gradually stop teaching them, even if they were “still on the syllabus and should be taught”, as DVSA stated. Pupils – and especially their parents – are highly likely to object to paying for lessons if they’re being taught stuff they don’t “need”, in their eyes. Christ, before any bay parking was included on tests up here, no one taught it at all. TIR and RRC are no different to that now.
What makes it all the more annoying is that it wouldn’t have cost DVSA a penny, or caused them any extra work, to keep both on the test as possible manoeuvres that could be requested, along with the newer ones. That way, instructors would have had to teach them – and pupils would have had to accept that. It would also have resulted in better trained drivers. I’d like to think DVSA will come to its senses and bring them back, because if they leave it too long it will be a major problem, since ADIs won’t remember* how to teach them properly.
Unfortunately, as with most large organisations, logic is not DVSA’s strongest point.
* You think I’m kidding? When they first introduced bay parking at one of the then two test centres in Nottingham, 80% of ADIs boycotted that one and went to the other. They didn’t know how to teach it. Several retired because of it.