Help! I keep failing the driving test.

A Mum rang me today “Can you help please. My Son keeps failing the driving test”.

It turns out that her Son has now had 4 attempts at the driving test, and keeps failing for completely different reasons eg the Police were searching someone on the road and it put him off, on another test he drove the wrong way up a one way street. The relationship between her Son and the Driving Instructor had now broken down. But her Son has another driving test in 4 days time and she wanted to know could I assist?

At one point she said “It’s crazy, it seems to me that whether anyone passes the test or not is completely down to luck, depending on what else is going on”.

I can entirely see where she is coming from….. but would not agree.

I recounted to her the incident that happened very recently on a driving test in Grantham, whereby the Examiner said in Signal Road “At the end of the road, turn left please”.   I was in the back of the car observing the test, and saw that when we got to the end of the road, there was a long stretch of road works where half the road that we were turning into, was coned off. So now, there was only one lane of traffic in the road we needed to turn left into, but traffic could come from either left or right. Temporary traffic lights were at either end of the road works. We could just about see the end of the road works to our right, but it was blind to our left.

What to do? There were no traffic lights in Signal Road. Would you just emerge left and hope for the best?

My pupil looked right again, and saw that there was a car stopped by the temporary traffic lights. She waited for that car to eventually move towards us and THEN, she emerged left. Clever stuff. Thinking on her feet. She had correctly deduced that when that car to her right started to move, the traffic lights there would have turned green, and as such, the traffic lights controlling traffic to our left, would have turned red so she could move off. Turned out that she was correct. There were 4 cars being held on the other red traffic light when we passed them. The Examiner did not intervene once, and no mention was made of it in the de-brief either.

But consider for a moment how differently that COULD have gone if turning left too soon had been met by those 4 cars coming the other way! Who would be to blame? Would it be the fault of the people doing the road works for not including traffic lights in Signal Road? Would it be the fault of the Examiner for choosing a test route that had road works on it? Would it be the fault of the Driving Instructor for not preparing the pupil properly for such eventualities? Would it be put down to “test nerves”?

It is very easy to blame driving test fails on Driving Instructors, Examiners, other road users etc if you keep failing the driving test, but ultimately there is no substitute for driving experience. The ethos of BIG TOM Driving School is “Drive more, to experience more, to learn more”.   It is a winning concept, that truly gets results. If you keep failing the driving test, call us now on 0800 689 4174 or fill this very short form out and we guarantee to get back to you….. no excuses!