Yes, of course you do! This article in getwokingham made me smile.
All it is is a story about two learners who have won 30 hours of driving lessons each. That’s ALL it is – unless you listen to the driving school who put up the prize, for whom it is a major advertising exercise.
At [big-headed school in question] we have a slightly different way of learning which aims to help people develop their driving skills rather than just pass the test.
If I had £1 for every driving school – single- or multi-car – which has claimed this, I’d be able to retire.
Let’s just set the record straight on a few points. Every ADI is self-employed, and the way they teach is purely down to them. So no school or franchise can claim that all of its instructors are identical, because they aren’t. Nor could they ever be.
An ADI might be taught to teach a certain way by his instructor, but once he is out teaching he will develop his own style. Simple fact.
In exactly the same way, learner drivers will do the same once they pass their tests.
Every driving school in existence is there to teach people to pass the test – that’s because there is a test that must be passed, and that creates a market for people who can teach you how to do it.
Like everything else in life, learning new things is merely a stepping stone to further development. When a child learns to write, they quickly learn to express themselves in ways that are specific to them. They don’t just learn to write the alphabet and nothing else – they apply their knowledge and develop new skills independently of anyone else. This is one of the miracles of the human brain.
Driving is the same. If people are taught appropriately – I’ll leave the word “correctly” to the idiot school in the article – then they are given all the necessary tools to carry on developing. They do not need showing how to use them in every conceivable situation. Anyone who thinks they do – like the school in the article is implying it does – is not as clever as they think they are.
A few ADIs out there take things to extremes, of course, and only drive test routes. Of course, I’m sure the school in question is going to drive miles and miles away from test routes during those 30 hours the two learners have won.
The bottom line back in the real world is that someone somewhere has donated around £1,500 worth of free lessons and got their company splashed all over a newspaper. It would cost a lot more than £1,500 to do that through normal advertising.
Oh, yes. And they are driving instructors like most others. They teach people to drive.
And one final thing. One of the prize winners said:
I was really surprised and shocked to find out I had won. It will save me a lot of money, well, it will save my dad a lot of money.
So like every other learner out there, her main priority is to spend as little as possible in order to get her licence.
So it matters little that the driving school claims that it “does things differently”. The only “different” thing any school can do to get people to become safer drivers than they would otherwise be is to get them to take more and more lessons. Because experience only comes with driving time.
Making them take more lessons is a certain way of making them go to a different school – it happens all the time when people know they aren’t being taught quickly, and end up spending too much time parked up and yapping away.
Still, it was a nice advert for them.