Seeking safety advice

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It has been created in association with Drive.Day, a free magazine offering advice and guidance for those wishing to train and qualify as professional driving instructors.

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Over ten weeks, we will publish a small selection of the articles in this guide.

This week, Terry Cook maps out the help available for teaching road safety in driving lessons.

Seeking safety advice

Driving Instructors can improve road safety for everyone, and there are some wonderful
resources out there to help.

Most people don’t become Driving Instructors to make the roads a safer place. The idea of
being your own boss, setting your working hours, and decent earning potential are the oft-
cited reasons given.
If you sense a ‘but’ coming, it’s that ADIs are in such a privileged position being able to
spend time with people on their learning journey and generally with younger people for 40,
50, 60 hours in total. We’re the envy of the road safety sector, which is desperately trying to
reduce road deaths from five a day to zero. We have the ability to make roads safer.

As you begin your journey to become an awesome ADI, I’d encourage you to take a moment
and think about the number of collisions you are going to prevent and how you’ll go about
doing that. A growing number of instructors are moving away from test focussed lessons and
putting the emphasis on real life scenarios.

Examples of this include late evening lessons, multi-storey car parks, rural roads, and
motorways. We also bring in much more conversation now, engaging pupils by asking how
they will handle difficult situations such as having friends in the car who are being a
nuisance. We want to really prepare new drivers so that they don’t have to learn how to
drive once they pass a test.

Our job isn’t to make everyone perfect, it’s to improve people as much
as possible

There are some wonderful resources available to help you. You may have read already Olly
Tayler elsewhere in this publication, who runs The Honest Truth app which is an incredible
resource that can help bring road safety into driving lessons using a language that young
drivers will understand. DriveFit is a series of videos produced by Dr Elizabeth Box and is
another excellent resource that can be shared with pupils and parents alike.

However, I do feel that I should be honest, not everyone will jump on board with all the
resources and further training that is available. Our driving culture, while moving forward, is
still outdated. Some parents won’t watch the videos you send, some pupils may have test
routes on the brain. Our job isn’t to make everyone perfect, it’s to improve people as much
as possible, and push them further along that road safety spectrum towards Vision Zero.
I still tell my students the examiner doesn’t decide if they can drive, we decide that. The
examiner simply says if they can drive legally. While there are some amazing resources for
our pupils, and I’ve only mentioned a few here, there’s also plenty for you too!

Road Safety GB have some great courses for instructors, some of which are free. Plus, there
are organisations such as RoadPeace and Brake who have a wealth of online information
available at your fingertips. Of course, there’s also The Instructor Podcast. Admittedly, I’m
biased, but with hundreds of hours of free training, and plenty designated to road safety for
instructors, it’s a very good place to start. For now, let’s keep raising standards.

Terry Cook
The Instructor Podcast

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