The article on the blog, Should I Become A Driving Instructor, is very popular. Yes, it’s very long, but there’s only so much information you can convey in a single Tweet, or with a couple of rows of emoticons in a Facebook post, and sometimes you have to go into the grown-ups’ world and actually read more than a handful of words to learn anything.
One of the points I make in that article – indeed, in a fair number of articles on this blog – is that many independent driving instructors have a completely blinkered view of the world, and genuinely believe that when they’re independent, every single penny they take from their pupils is profit. In particular, they sincerely believe that compared to a franchisee with a driving school who pays maybe £180 per week, they earn £180 extra by not having to pay a franchise.
When they’re giving bad advice to prospective or recently qualified instructors, they readily advise them to go independent and not to pay money to any of these thieves and robbers (aka driving schools). They say that they can get their own pupils just like that (and their car is free, of course), so why waste money paying someone to do it for you?
So it makes me smile when I see them online asking about pupil referral companies, and then seeing the replies that show a lot of other independents are already using those same companies. You’re not “independent” if you’re relying on someone else to get pupils for you. It doesn’t matter, of course – but it means the “independent” claim is simply untrue.
When someone is with a franchise, in most cases that franchise supplies pupils. If it’s a decent franchise, then a decent number of pupils will be available. So the £180 the franchisee is paying covers the car, insurance, pupil supply, and probably a few other things.
As I explain in the Should I Become A Driving Instructor article, an independent instructor will likely be paying between £70-£150 for a car if he or she is leasing it. If they buy outright, they’ll be paying about the same per week if they keep the car for three years (£70 for a Corsa, £130 for a Ford Focus, at least £150 for a BMW 113i) then sell it. Even if they have a banger, it’s still going to have a weekly cost for tax purposes of £30-£50. And if other Facebook posts are anything to go by, most independents are being asked to pay about £300-£400 a year on average for insurance (£6-£7 a week, though some are up to double that). These pupil referral companies charge around £20 per pupil.
Independents will deny all this, of course, but it’s true. Even an ADI using the cheapest (non-banger) car option is paying around £100 a week if he is taking these referrals. If the ADI has a BMW, he’s paying more like £170.
And franchises are a rip-off for new instructors, right?
Don’t get me wrong. I have no issue with these referral companies. I only have issues with instructors who mislead others by making false claims about how much it costs them to run their businesses (I wonder if they tell HMRC the same?) and how easy it is to source your own pupils, when they end up paying someone else to do it for them.