For Parents
“I find it quite staggering that the public aren’t standing up and stamping their feet more about the whole issue of driver training when the pass rate has remained so consistently low, and the injury rate for young drivers after passing the test is so high”.
So said Gary Austin, former Chief Executive of the Driving Standards Agency and now Managing Director of ‘a2om’ (said ‘atom’), the only other driving school with an ethos which is akin to that of Care Motoring, in a recent interview with ADI News. I could not agree with him more! Please allow me to quote further from this article, from the introductory section, referring to progress made to reduce the death rate on Britain’s roads by the introduction of the driving test:
“In 1934, 7,343 people were killed on Britain’s roads, despite there being just 2.4 million vehicles on the road, 1.5 million of which were cars………….today we have in excess of 30 million cars alone on our roads, and the number of deaths has fallen to around 3,500. This is great but, in recent years, progress has halted. In fact, for the vulnerable drivers, young novice drivers who have literally just left the care of professional driving instructors or parents, the death and injury rate is increasing alarmingly. Driving is the single biggest killer of young people; not drugs, not cancer, or any other headline grabbing stalker of our children’s health and welfare, yet driving and death seems a tolerated combination unlike anything else - every hour, a person under 25 is killed or seriously injured in a traffic accident. It is bewildering that, in an age when health and safety czars issue edicts forbidding children to play conkers in schools, or eat the dreaded turkey twizzler in the lunchtime refectory session, there seems so little concern in schools and, more strikingly, in society generally about young drivers and how they learn to handle what can so easily become a lethal weapon.”
And on the attitude of both government and parents to this issue:
“If government cannot set up an appropriate teaching and training structure, and parents refuse to pay for their children to gain the appropriate level of driver education to teach the precious babies ’safe driving for life’, driving instructors are stuck in a market that prescribes the bare minimum at the lowest price, but that can lead, however unintentionally, to the highest cost, a death.”
It is precisely because of everything quoted here that Care Motoring was set up, to try to influence, in some small way, the training of young drivers. Each of us takes out insurance to cover a whole spectrum of eventualities, from loss of a treasured possession to loss of life, and yet so few seem to recognise that the process of learning to drive is only a process of learning to pass the driving test, and offers no ‘insurance’ for post-test safety. I am not trying to imply driving instructors do a bad job, most do the best job possible in the circumstances, but the circumstances are that most, parents included, aim to find the instructor who can get the learner a driving test pass in the shortest possible time for the least amount of money. The pressure is on the driving instructor to ensure the learner is at test standard, not that he/she is the safest they possibly can be to handle the myriad of traffic situations they will encounter, alone. This is why we, at Care Motoring, urge all who have a loved one about to embark on learning to drive, to get involved with them, be courageous and become a learner with them, and learn how you can help them to practise, to the highest possible standard, and gain that essential driver experience before they gain that licence to drive alone. If you are a parent, then you have been with them, supporting them, from the day they were born, and all the way through school, so why abandon them now, just when they are facing learning the one skill that threatens their personal safety the most?
Currently the whole process of driver training and testing is under review by the Government, and their long-awaited consultation document has just been published, but the wheels of government turn exceedingly slowly, with 5 years having been set as the trial period for their proposals, and in the meantime far too many young people are suffering the consequences. We are offering you an alternative solution now, a solution which matches all proposals for learner driver training within the consultation document, available right now through our CareLearner programme, but the decision to accept it is up to you.
You can download a copy of the consultation document by clicking on the following link:
http://www.dsa.gov.uk/Documents/Consultation/ltd/DSA%20-%204222%20Consultation%20Bro-20080605.pdf
Choose Care Motoring…
Because you care
