Well, it’s only in one area, but Peterborough’s Evening Telegraph reports that the highest number of adult non-fiction loans were for “The Official Driving Standards Agency Theory Test for Car Drivers” and “The Official Highway Code”.
The main thing to take from this is that in these tough economic times, people are still learning to drive. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that this trend is mirrored across the UK as a whole.
Mind you, with the Highway Code being freely available online, and only costing as little as £1.50 from Amazon (RRP £2.50) with free postage, or from 1p if you buy a used one, you do wonder what kind of people are getting them from libraries. It probably costs more to go there and back on the bus than it does to buy one!
However, with so many instructors saying they don’t have enough work, it makes you wonder why. One argument is that there are too many instructors, but I’m not convinced about that. Although there was a rush on people becoming instructors a few years ago, that hasn’t been the case for the last couple. To be honest, I never saw any effect on my own workload – it goes up and down throughout the year without any real predictability, but it’s always sufficient. Sometimes there’s a low in summer (and sometimes not), sometimes its at Christmas (and sometimes not, as this year has shown), sometimes it’s with the students coming back or going home (and sometimes not)…
In any case, with the recession, this industry had better get ready for another rush of people trying to become instructors.