Transferring from Another School

It is advisable for you to have an initial assessment lesson so your instructor can assess where you are at in the learning process and help you to move forward. After the lesson you will have some idea of how many more lessons you might need until you are ready for your test and you can book further lessons from there with your instructor.

People often contact me to say that they are unhappy with their current instructor. Sometimes people have a gut feeling that lessons aren’t going as well as they should be. This could be for several reasons.

Driving lessons should have a structure to them and lessons should be relaxed and not tense to provide the best learning environment. Everyone learns at a different pace and instructors must tailor their teaching methods to suit the individual.

Instructors should be on time most of the time (allowing for some occasions when they are held up in traffic) and lessons should be for the full time paid for.

Lessons should have a general structure including a recap of the previous lesson, objectives of the current lesson, a briefing on any new subjects to be learnt, the practical lesson, and a recap at the end of the lesson.

Any mistakes you make along the way should be dealt with by your instructor first identifying the fault, then analysing why it happened, and then remedying it by explaining or showing you how to not make the mistake again. A good way to re-enforce your understanding is for an instructor to use the ‘question and answer’ technique.

Good driving instructors will often anticipate mistakes and intervene before you even make them, but of course every learner will make errors and an instructor should never react by being confrontational, shouting or being aggressive or disparaging towards you. This certainly isn’t the best learning environment!

If you aren’t able to complete a task independently and need a talk through or prompts to help, your instructor should guide you calmly to help build your confidence. They should give you feedback at all stages of the learning process so you know if you are doing something well or not.

As you get nearer test standard and have been taught the syllabus, there will be less learning of new subjects and more driving around practicing what you have already learnt and preparing you for the driving test.