Really worthwhile and excellent course…
Really worthwhile and excellent course for under 17 year olds interested in getting a good preparation for driving. Over 4 days, driving on an old airstrip from 9.30 to 3 or 4pm, with briefing and classroom educational sessions at 9am and 12.30pm for 30-60mins, including sessions by Safer Roads Humber, the police, DHL road safety partnership, and sessions such as causes of collisions, consequences, assertiveness, together with practical sessions such as brake and avoid. The main areas had road layouts to enable driving training for the absolute beginner including straight areas, roundabouts, an alpine road layout, and technical areas such as chicanes (forward and back), right and left parallel parking areas, right and left hand reverse turns, 3 point turns. 5 experienced and qualified instructors (in addition to marshals) with value-added, daily one-to-one sessions (approx 20-30mins each, daily - so not loads) and assessments, enabled amazing progress for my 16 year old in 4 days. However it does require the involvement of an engaged adult and the use of their (ideally manual transmission) car. There were also visits from the Police speed camera team and their van, DHL and a huge truck and a research team from UCL with their driving simulator to monitor hazard perception using state of the art vision tracking hardware. Even better the course fee is subsidised by the police in this area! At the end of the 4 day course my son could confidently drive my manual car to 40mph, changing up and down gears smoothly including block gear changes, easily parallel park the car right and left, reverse round a corner, do a 3 point turn, drive forward and reverse through chicanes, and drive down an alpine extremely curvey type road layout at some speed in 2nd gear, and reverse park the car numerous times in the car park alongside other cars from day 1. Now we have to continue this in a real world environment, do formal driving lessons, pass his test and drive safely! There were 21 participants (course full), 60/40 girls to boys, mostly 17 but one or 2 younger, and 6 automatic cars (rest manual). 3 levels of driving standard, all achieved level 3, most also achieved level 2, but only 2 of 21 achieved level 1 on this course. Also there is a daily theory test with increasing difficulty which has to be done to get the certificates. Run by well qualified and enthusiastic volunteers. Excellent. Recommended. Oh and the instructors also did a live braking distance demonstration of light, medium and heavy cars at 30, 50 and 70mph for stopping distances (see video).
April 13, 2023
Unprompted review
