Learning to drive isn't the same as it used to be
Learning to drive had long been a rite of passage for many people, but the process of learning to drive has changed significantly in recent years.. From the type of instructing, the levels of traffic to in-vehicle technology – it’s all changed……for the better of road safety.
Technically we're not instructors
We’re called driving instructor but, we’re not really instructors any more. This is why I changed my business name in 2022. Driving instructors now gear their training towards a coaching structure. It’s a well known fact that you’re more likely to remember something if you’ve come up with it yourself or you’ve worked it out for yourself.
As a wise man once said (Bob Morton), you often hear instructors in the test centre saying to their students “Now, remember to check your mirrors, remember to check your blind spot. Remember at that busy roundabout, you need to be in the right hand lane.” Well, guess what? When they’re out on their driving test, they’re going to forget everything you said.
Driver training now focuses on a two way conversation between the learner and the coach (instructor) to work out a way for the learner to come up with their own way of driving in a safe manner. It’s widely believed that we all know how to drive, we just haven’t worked it out yet. We all have experiences of the roads whether being a passenger in a car or as a pedestrian. Do you really need to be ‘told’ what a red light means?
Creating a judgement free coaching environment means that the learning is happening in a relaxed space for the learner to feel like they can express their own thoughts, feelings and ideas about how things should happen.
Taking the learning to higher levels
It’s not about how to control the car. It’s not about how to steer around a roundabout.
Learning to drive needs a deeper level of appreciation and understanding for the driving career to be a safe and successful one. Traditionally, learning to drive focused on topic based lessons where the learning focuses on ‘how to do a roundabout’ or ‘how to reverse the car into a bay’.
Rather than focus on topics, learning to drive now puts a focus on skills. Here at RoadSmart, we focus on 5 core skills (Courtesy of Inspire Instructor Training).
By focusing on skills, the topic is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealign with a roundabout or a junction, the skills are what make the outcome successful. If one of the skills is not executed, other skills are affected.
Why do skills matter?
1. Real-World Readiness
Knowing what a hazard is doesn’t mean you can react to one. Skill-based training teaches drivers to spot, evaluate, and respond to hazards instinctively. This kind of muscle memory and decision-making can’t be built through theory alone.
2. Adaptability
Topics are fixed, but driving conditions are not. Roads, weather, traffic, and other drivers’ behavior constantly change. Skill-based training helps learners develop flexibility and confidence to handle unpredictable scenarios, not just textbook ones.
3. Better Retention
People remember what they do far more than what they’re told. Practicing parallel parking 20 times in different environments is far more effective than reading about it or watching a demo once.
4. Safer Long-Term Habits
Skills-based instruction doesn’t just get learners through the driving test—it builds habits that last. Good mirror use, appropriate speed control, and calm decision-making become ingrained through repetition and real-time feedback.
5. Empowerment Through Experience
Rather than being spoon-fed information, learners in a skills-focused model are encouraged to assess situations, make choices, and reflect on outcomes. This active learning builds independence and critical thinking—two essentials for safe driving.
Taking the learner to new levels for the sake of road safety
In Great Britain, 17-24 year olds are disproportionately represented in crash statistics. In 2023, a fifth of all killed or seriously injured casualties from collisions in a car involved young drivers. I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a staggering and worrying statistic.
Most notably, those who are involved are;
– 17-24 year olds
– Typically male drivers
– Those collisions are happening on rural roads
– They happening in the dark
– They’re happening when male drivers are carrying peer age passengers.
What's the solution?
Graduated driving licenses are often talked about as the solution to reducing road death in young drivers. However, the idea is that as a new young driver, you’ll be restricted to curfews, so you won’t be able to drive after a certain time at night, or you won’t be allowed to carry peer age passengers for 6 months after passing your driving test (these are just suggested which are talked about).
But what happens after 6 months? The young driver is then allowed to carry peer age passengers and drive in the dark. What’s to stop those young drivers just doing what they were going to do in the first place and go drive dangerously on rural roads int he dark?
The restriction doesn’t give the young driver the experience they need or change their behaviours.
Developing thoughts, feelings and beliefs and experience
Driver training plays a pivotal role and is perfectly situated to be the intervention that’s needed to challenges the thoughts, feelings and beliefs of young drivers.
As I mentioned earlier, traditionally, driver training focused on lower levels of learning to driver in how to control the car and how to navigate traffic and the roads.
To be an early intervention to risky driving and gaining experience, driver training plays a role in developing an understanding about the various risk increasing factors associated with driving as well as developing a persons decision making to reduce risk increasing factors and how their personality, emotions and life goals can influence their decision making.
If driving instructors can make a difference in these early stages of someone’s driving career, they can help shape how a young driver might decide to not succumb to peer pressure and race down that rural road. Instead he’ll say no. Or someone will decide not to get in the car of someone who they know will take a risk and drive dangerously.
We need our young drivers to be safe drivers, thinking drivers and those who decide that surviving the drive far outweighs the thrill of showing off to their mates.
There’s also a lot to be said about experience. Traditionally, learner drivers didn’t get much experience in driving on high speed roads such as dual carriageways, motorways or rural roads. There has long been some form of experience but it could be argued that there hasn’t been enough. There has been to much focused on what needs to be done to pass a driving test but that doesn’t prepare learners for real world driving.
Recent proposed changes to the driving test are trialling assessing learners in their driving test on more high speed roads such as rural roads, which will probably encourage driving instructors to spend more time developing the skills on these roads. But shouldn’t that happen anyway. We should be teaching our learners safe driving skills for life gearing the training to real life driving, not driving to pass a driving test.
At RoadSmart we spend just as much time of dual carriageways and rural roads as we do turning left and right into side roads in residential streets. Our learners gain experience in driving long distances on dual carriageways stopping at service stations as well as driving out into the wild countryside and getting lost to find their way back home…..real life driving!
Concluding Thoughts
Driver training needs to be a two way contract between the ‘learner’ and the ‘instructor’ developing skills based around awareness, anticipating, planning and developing thoughts, feelings, beliefs and decision making to reduce the risk of a young driver become a terrible statistc in road crash fatalities.