DVSA sent out a message a few months ago on the top reasons people fail their tests.
A lot of sources have glibly quoted this verbatim, but it doesn’t explain things in detail, and taking it at face value is confusing, to say the least.
I’m not going to repeat what is in that DVSA link. Others have done that to death. But the bottom line in seven of the ten reasons is using your bloody eyes and brain! Observations.
Even that isn’t the full story though. Yes, observations are vitally important, but only to someone who is driving using their brain. There’s no point ‘observing’ if you don’t ‘see’ what is there. And when I am on lessons, I am painfully aware of when people turn their heads to look in the mirrors or over their shoulders, and are not actually looking for anything.
DVSA gives the Number 1 reason as:
Not making effective observations at junctions
DVSA
But this is meaningless if the instructor cannot identify the deeper reason why the learner hasn’t done it.
Some years ago, one of mine failed going straight ahead on a roundabout. It was the Virgin roundabout in Nottingham. There are two lanes going in, two lanes coming out, so there must be two lanes on the roundabout (even if there are no markings). The pupil didn’t stay in lane as they negotiated it.
In the debrief, the examiner said this:
I asked you to go ahead on the roundabout. You approached in the left hand lane, straight-lined it – which is perfectly OK – but you didn’t check your mirrors to see if anyone was alongside you.
DVSA Examiner
I’ve always remembered it, and it illustrates the problem. The examiner was absolutely right, of course, on a technical level. But practically, it was of no use whatsoever to the pupil. At the time of the debrief, the pupil didn’t even know which roundabout the examiner was talking about (I’m not even sure if he realised he was still in Nottingham). When he came to that roundabout, he didn’t know there were two lanes. Oh, yes, we’d done it many times before, but at that particular moment his brain emptied and he was utterly clueless. That was the problem – not just poor observation/mirror checks.
Consequently, DVSA would just log this as ‘mirrors’ or ‘observations’ – hence their #1 reason for failing – but there is much, much more to it as far as the ADI is concerned. The issue to be dealt with is why the pupil didn’t check their mirrors. Not just that they didn’t.
It’s the same with all the ‘top ten reasons’. It’s not what people do wrong – but why they do it wrong.