11/09/2025
THE INSTRUCTOR AND THE LEARNER
I am sure that many of you will have seen this video on social media recently. I would like to share it again, unedited and from an Instructors point of view.
As Driving Instructors, we need to adhere to DVSA guidelines, which include teaching rules of the road, awareness, judgement, anticipation, planning ahead and several other skills. All of these are required to pass today’s driving test and will result in safe, sensible, capable, considerate and law-abiding drivers onto roads that are busier and more congested than ever before. We must pass an enhanced disclosure to ensure that we are fit and proper people, after which we must pass a rigorous three-part qualification process, a process that a lot do not pass.
Once qualified, we must maintain and prove our professional standards, knowledge and must run our own business. This includes providing and maintaining a road worthy and legal vehicle including Road Tax, which means that we allowed BY LAW to drive, manoeuvre and park on the very same public roads and car parks as every other law-abiding driver. Our vehicles are fitted with various adaptations including dual control brakes (not gas), mirrors, sat-navs and dash cams. We spend so much time in these vehicles that we know every inch of them.
We must teach the law to our pupils. We don’t mind doing 20mph in a 20 zone…. because that is the law. We are happy sitting at 29mph in a 30 zone…. because that is the law. We don’t mind waiting for a safer gap at a junction or a roundabout and we don’t feel the need to floor the gas the split second a light goes to green. But we see you 3, 4, 5 cars behind. We know the signs that you’ve spotted the roof box, we see the imperceptible movements that tell us you’re about to attempt a ridiculous, dangerous and unnecessary manoeuvre to get ahead of us. We get tailgated, unwarranted honks, gesticulations, verbal abuse and we have to deal with every bigoted idiot that think they know more about the roads than we do. We teach our pupils not to retaliate to this behaviour but at the end of the day, we are not robots…. we are all human.
And on each lesson, we watch and scan like a hawk for the unexpected. We need to plan a lot further ahead than the average driver so that we can spot any potential issue, verbalise it to our pupil, give them time to process what we have said, let them assess the situation, let them make a decision and then act on it. We NEVER switch off and believe me, even though we are sitting all day (unhealthy in itself) we come home mentally and physically exhausted.
Then we have the dreaded diary management. We have to accommodate up to 30 pupils’ schedules and commitments in any one week. We have to work around various jobs, school, college, university, childcare, appointments, ailments and cancellations. We also have our own commitments to work around and with the average UK Instructor age of 52 (as of 2020) we often have our own children, grandchildren, or elderly parents to care for as well.
We are one of the few professions STILL in post lockdown recovery, you need only look at the 24-27 week wait for a driving test. We jump through hoops every day trying to help people whilst they wait months on end for a test to stay at test standard and paying a fortune in lessons that they don’t really need. Lots of them really need their licence for a career opportunity, to care for a family member, or for getting to hospital with a long-term illness. Imagine the stress we see in them every day because they know that just one lapse in concentration on that driving test, means failing and going to the back of the queue for months on end. We see stress, anxiety, tears, meltdowns and utter despair at times.
And as Driving Instructors, what do we do? We turn up, we stay positive, we guide, we enthuse, we motivate, we reassure them that they DO have the same right as everyone else to be on the road and that they WILL achieve their goal. It’s not easy seeing all of our hard work wasted in a split second because another road user gets irate at them for “being in the way”. It’s not always easy for us to keep our cool with other drivers when they do this.
One of the skills that Driving Instructors teach is the Parallel Park. To do this, we need a long open road which is also wide enough for other road users to pass safely. Brunswick Road in Sunderland offers all of this and is close to the practice areas around the Driving Test Centre. The particular gradient on this road means that can also teach adaptability if the usual method goes wrong.
A resident on this particular road has been verbally abusing and intimidating Instructors on an increasing basis. He claims that learners are using his mother’s car to reverse behind, from 6.30am to 9pm and reports he has counted around 80 learners in one day, practicing on his mother’s White Peugeot car and there are more videos of him brandishing his gold club at unsuspecting learners. He may feel he has the right to be upset, but this reaction and subsequent behaviour is wholly wrong and perhaps he should take the matter up with DVSA, who closed South Shields Driving Test Centre back in 2022 (for bureaucratic reasons) and forced learners from two Boroughs onto Sunderland roads.
We are all aware of the situation and whilst we may empathise or sympathise, we still have a job to do. This particular Instructor had been in the majority who refrain from using the said White Peugeot in question but on this particular instance it was not there. He took the opportunity to practice the Parallel Park only for the mother to aggressively pull directly into the space that his learner was attempting to reverse into. Ironically, a supervised learner is likely to be the safest, because both Instructors and Examiners would prevent any collision.
So why are the Instructor and the Learner such a dreaded sight? Why are we not respected as a profession who are responsible for the safety of our roads for tomorrow’s generation of law-abiding drivers? I would like to say something smart and informative but, in all honesty……. I just don’t know why.
If you are in that much of a rush, you should take ownership of the fact that you could have set off on your journey a little sooner. Perhaps in these days of rushing around, we should all slow down a little, take a breath, be kinder and remember that we were all a Learner once upon a time….
Vikki Holt – Approved Driving Instructor
