In this blog, owner of BIG TOM Driving School, Tom Ingram offers some guidance to new pupils about to embark on the process of learning to drive. Tom Ingram has been a registered driving instructor since 2009 working in East Anglia including helping pupils in Peterborough, Lincoln, Boston, Melton Mowbray, Spalding, Stamford and Grantham.
“I think the first thing to do is put some context to this topic so that any readers can see that my guidance is not aimed at generating any income for myself but instead, to try and assist pupils to learn. Having done this job now for a while and helping 200+ pupils I have seen how painful the process can be for some, and I believe it is avoidable just by paying attention to how they learn.
You could, in theory, learn how to drive a car simply by repeated practice with virtually no guidance from anyone else. It would be challenging and probably involve many mistakes, but you would imagine, given enough time, a person could independently learn how to operate a car. I recall from a driving instructors conference that the actual percentage of people who learn in this manner is extremely low, the figure quoted was much less than 1% I think a couple of reasons why it is not a very popular way to learn is because it could be risky, potentially causing safety critical incidents WHILE in the process of learning, and secondly, it would very likely be unkind to the vehicle e.g. putting strain on parts like the clutch, gear box, brakes and also potential damage to wheels hitting kerbs. But the above is limited to only learning HOW to operate the vehicle. It doesn’t include learning skills such as applying the theory to real-life situations, what you might call, the ‘rules of the road’. It doesn’t include thinking about how a driver assesses risk, judges spatial awareness, or how they make decisions such as whether to emerge from a junction, how to choose where to park or which manoeuvre to do for a given situation. It doesn’t take into account how someone learns what speed is appropriate for different driving conditions. So, with a little thought, you can start to see that a learner can gather a great deal of insight and learning just from listening to how a person thinks about things, WHILE they are driving – so this is less physical skills of eyes, hands and feet actions, and more about cognitive skills about how they THINK while they drive. Clearly, with something as practical as driving a vehicle, if a driver is not thinking at all while driving (or perhaps very limited thoughts) then the consequences can be very serious. So I am now referring to the learning potential for someone who listens to the guidance given from a professional about what to be thinking about while driving – this is markedly different to the scope of how to operate a vehicle.
One of the challenges with modern day learning techniques is that many pupils adopt a very individualised, in fact, quite isolated approach to learning e.g. practising something on video games in a bedroom, or watching youtube videos or insta/tik tok clips on a mobile phone (again, another solitary experience). And so, because this has become the norm of how most young adults are learning new things, the prospect of sitting in a vehicle and learning from the verbals given from an experienced driver sat next to them, is actually quite alien and unknown. It is not uncommon for pupils that I work with to demonstrate almost a disbelief, or loss of trust that they can learn from listening and talking to another person, such is their conditioning of learning information from videos.
We have created a generation of learners who quite literally, are not used to learning from other humans, face to face. In an academic learning environment, this might not represent much of an issue, students in schools and universities may be able to learn remotely using laptops and other devices, still absorbing the essential learning content, but for practical learning environments, where the risks are higher due to it not being theoretical but in fact, very practical and real – this does pose something of a potential problem.
It would be wrong of me to give the impression that this is affecting all young learners, because some learners are pretty efficient learners by either natural ability or being used to learning other practical skills previously, but I would say that those kind of learners are the minority.
And in addition to that point, it is a sad fact that the pass rate of the theory test is also at all time lows nationally, being significantly lower than the practical test pass rate. It always used to be the case, (10+ years ago), that the pass rate of the theory was at the 60% + range and the practical driving test rate at around 45% , but now the theory test pass rate is down at about 40%. So what this tells us is that this alternative way of learning for even academic, theoretical knowledge, is not serving pupils very well either. Which means that we really need to be encouraging our young adults to pay attention to HOW they are learning.
Failing theory and practical tests is demoralising, expensive and time-consuming….. not even to mention, unsafe.
It seems that more trust is now being given to YouTube influencers than to professionals within learning establishments. I would go one step further than that having paid attention to pupils over the last few years in my driving school car, and suggest that they will even trust ordinary people that they engage on social media platforms (friends/family and even strangers) MORE than they would a qualified driving instructor. This natural reliance (and blind trust) on information gained from unqualified, potentially inexperienced people online is a very worrying trend and I think goes some way to explaining why many young adults are struggling to learn effectively these days. “
