Have your driving school sign noticed by a wider audience

Avoiding driving lessons in the test areas

It is preferable to keep out of the test route areas as much as possible, although this is difficult when your clients live in them. However, when these clients are able to drive quite competently, take them away from the test routes.

Realistic routes

It is important that your clients drive around as many different locations as possible to develop their repertoire of skills and to build up their experience. If you keep to the same routes and areas, boredom will set in and they may also feel anxious about venturing further a field once they have passed their test. Also, they may become complacent and believe that, because they are successfully dealing with everything in their limited world, they have mastered the art of driving.

Resisting pressure to use test areas

Very often your clients will ask when they will be driving in the test town/area as many of their friends are doing. If your clients have been learning to drive in another area, they will quite naturally be eager to get to the test area as soon as possible. It is for you to decide when it is the best time to do this. If they start using the test routes too early, they may think they are nearing test standard when they may in fact be far from it. If they start too early they may also become stale and bored.

On the other hand, if they start too late they may not experience all the tricky places, which could result in a failed test. The time spent in the test area should not be devoted just to doing ‘the test routes’. Have your client drive all around the town, passing through test routes occasionally, but you do not want a client who can only drive along certain roads and is only happy reversing around certain corners.

Keep in mind that you are teaching this person to drive for the rest of their lives and that their driving experience needs to be as broad as possible. Let them drive out of their home town and into the next town. If possible, have them drive through rural areas. Use the dual carriageways. Give them navigation exercises because they will not always have you on their shoulder saying ‘At the next junction I would like you to …’. They will find all this challenging and stimulating, leaving them with a sense of achievement.

Problems in test areas

Apart from anything else, there is also the problem of getting in the way of the examiners conducting tests. It could be very frustrating and annoying for the examiners to find you are practising a manoeuvre on a corner they wish to use. Imagine if every other driving instructor in the area descended on the test route at the same time!

Try to see it from the driving licence examiner’s perspective. Examiners will have about 30-minutes to assess the candidate’s driving on the test, which includes the manoeuvres. They may run into heavy traffic and become a bit desperate about the time. The last thing the driving licence examiner then wants is to encounter every available manoeuvring spot filled by a driving school driving school car. The examiners will not appreciate it if your driving school name appears on the test routes too often.

Driving school cars on test routes can also be an added problem for the candidates taking the test. If you do need to use these areas, try to do so after the tests have finished in the late afternoon or at weekends. Imagine how you would feel if your client failed a test due to another driving school driving school car causing them serious difficulties.

You should also consider the feelings of the local residents. You have to sympathise with these people. Think how you would feel if you had to pick your way through learner after learner as you try desperately to get to work on time. Then in the evening, you meet the very same problems (with the very same driving instructors) when all you want to do is go home. To rub salt in the wound, once the local residents have had their evening meal, they can spend a relaxing evening watching driving school cars practising reverse parking around their pride and joy parked outside their house. This poses the thought that you should vary the vehicles you practise manoeuvring around and the roads you practise manoeuvres in.

There are sometimes cases on the news where local residents, annoyed with this situation, have been complaining to the DSA (Driving Standards Agency) and their MPs about these activities, trying to shut these areas down to driving instructors. If your driving school sign is seen too often on the learner routes and it becomes associated with anger and resentment, you may be the last on the list if any of the residents ever wants to employ a driving instructor.

Do not believe that old adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity. Venturing further a field will help avoid these problems. Give your client a broader driving experience and also have your driving school sign noticed by a wider audience.