Cost and Pricing:
Many learner students and their parents assume that all Driving Schools and Driving Instructors are the same! After all, they are qualified and trained to prepare you to pass your driving test, aren’t they? Well it may come as a surprise but not all Driving Instructors are qualified at all! It’s been a long-standing issue within the driving school industry that ‘trainee’ instructors are allowed by law to provide lessons at the same lesson rate as fully qualified instructors! Personally, I think this practice is very wrong and many Driving Schools do not mention this fact when students are booking their lessons. There are a couple of things you can do to find out if your allocated Instructor is fully qualified: 1. Ask at the time of booking and 2. Check their operating licence that should be in the front window of the tuition vehicle. A PINK licence indicates a trainee that is yet to pass their qualifying exam and a GREEN licence for a fully qualified Instructor.
Lest assume that your Instructor is fully qualified. Instructors vary enormously in the way they teach the syllabus and the quality of their teaching. They also vary in customer skills when it comes to their patients and friendliness. It is quite disturbing that around 30% of all learner drivers feel the need to change their driving instructor before reaching test standard because of incompatibility issues or the lack of student progress. Many Instructors work as sole operators and have no requirement for ongoing training. In fact, many independent Instructors never take any further training from the day that they qualified. Very few Driving Schools monitor their driving instructor’s performance and provide ongoing training to ensure they keep up to date with modern teaching methods.
Ever since I qualified myself over twenty years ago and started the Driving School, my approach has always been to provide outstanding value for money and customer rapport. As I started to grow the School, my main concern was how I could scale the School but still retain my own ethics. I was alarmed in the early days just how poor some of our early Instructor recruits were and the general standard of tuition being offered in the local area.
It was for this reason that we opened our own Instructor Training Academy during 2007. The only way I was able to guarantee that we only recruited the very best Instructors, was to teach and prepare them ourselves. All our Instructors now must come through our own Training Academy and take a comprehensive 80-hour course and qualify before they can teach any of our learner students.
As you can probably appreciate, the cost to prepare the very best Instructors is considerable and then we must pay them a suitable lesson fee to retain their services.
So how is this a benefit to you, the student? We operate a unique ALS (Accelerated Learning System) which as the name suggests, is in place to speed up your learning period and ensure you receive full value for your money. All our Instructors are trained on this system and we have quality control procedures in place to monitor the tuition you receive. You will also be provided with feedback forms on your Instructor, so you are able to mark them on their performance for all aspects of their interaction with you.
Your driving lessons will adhere to the DVSA’s client centred policy and will be interactive so you will have a big input to how they are conducted. This policy eliminates many frustrations that students encounter with large amounts of time parked at the kerbside and endless hours of aimless driving around with no firm lesson objective.
You can access full details of our unique ALS system by watching the main video on this page – ‘Save your time and your money by watching this video’.
Hopefully, I have been able to enlighten you as to why driving lesson prices vary enormously and explain why Driving Instructors are not all the same. Purchasing what appear to be ‘cheap’ lessons and a good deal is tempting, especially when on a tight budget, but like most things in life, there is often a hidden cost to cheap and that is quite often a much longer learning period, frustration at the lack of progress and the expense of a failed test and having to take further lessons.
We operate a very simple pricing policy:
Monday – Saturday:
Manual Lesson fees are £40.00 per hour with a minimum of two-hour lessons (£80.00)
Block Booking Discount when you purchase 10 Hours of -£20 (£380.00)
Automatic Lessons are £43.00 per hour with a minimum of two-hour lessons (£86.00)
Block Booking Discount when you purchase 10 Hours of -£20 (£410.00)
Sundays:
Manual Lesson fees are £50.00 per hour with a minimum of two-hour lessons (£100.00)
Automatic Lessons are £53.00 per hour with a minimum of two-hour lessons (£106.00)
* There are no discounts on Sunday lessons.
We suggest that if possible, you purchase a block of ten hours to benefit from the £20 discount. If for any reason you are not delighted with your instructor and your tuition, I will make a refund and any unused lessons purchased will also be refunded.
We operate a 48-hour pre-pay policy and your nominated instructor will contact you regarding payment via bank transfer.
PLEASE NOTE!
We do not take cash on the day of your lesson.
