Following 32 years of service with the West Midlands Police, 20 of those spent in the traffic division, Simon Cook turned his attention to driving instructing 10 years ago on a mission to make the UK’s young better and safer drivers.
The founder of System Driving and a Grade 6 ADI, Simon currently teaches both novices and instructors, and has written an ebook on better driving plus appeared as one of the unflappable ADIs in the ITV 1 series, The Undriveables:
What’s your approach to instructing learners?
To make sure that every driver who goes through my training comes out a safer driver by teaching my pupils to think and act like patrol car drivers. These men and women are without doubt the best drivers on our roads today because of their exceptionally high standard of training based on Roadcraft.
For those who aren’t aware of it, what is Roadcraft?
It’s the police system of car control that has been used to train all the emergency services for the past 75 years. And it works – if you think about all the emergency work undertaken by the authorities every day and then consider the minute number of accidents they are involved in, that’s because Roadcraft delivers the best results day in, day out.
At its core, the system is about observation, identifying what is going on around you at all times beyond what’s just in front of you. So in practical terms, when I am training someone to drive, it means we spend some time parked up at the side of the road. While there, I ask the pupil what is going on around them.
They’ll come back with something like: “Well, there’s a blue car parked up in front of us”. I’ll ask them though to look further and further afield, calling out everything that is going on around them and identifying potential hazards sometimes up to 200 metres away. It helps them realise that they must stay observant and aware at all times to ensure they consistently drive safely.
How else has your background as a traffic officer helped inform your driving instructing?
My background is why I wanted to become an instructor in the first place. You need to realise that as a traffic officer, I and my colleagues would invariably arrive at accident scenes before the ambulance did. We were the guys who used to drag the bodies out of the car and on occasion, I used to pull bodies out of crashed cars in the hope that the driver would still be alive – but there were times when they weren’t.
That experience has stayed with me, and I don’t want my pupils to end up with the emergency services pulling their lifeless bodies from the wreckage of a car. And as an ADI, I am in the best possible position to help them learn to drive safely. I have absolutely no interest in simply teaching someone how to pass the practical driving test; that’s just the beginning of the pupil’s driving career, and should never be seen as the be-and-end-all.
What issues do you have about young potential drivers and how they are taught?
It’s all to do with concentration and how long they can hold their focus in a lesson. We do a lot of work on concentration spans and building up a person’s resilience. I train some people who go out like lights after 60 minutes; stuff they were doing perfectly well 5-10 minutes ago suddenly becomes an issue. Why? It’s down to the duration of the lesson – these kids just run out of stamina after an hour. In computer speak, it’s like they’ve run out RAM!
It’s why I teach in one-hour sessions wherever I can – students can work hard for an hour, keep full concentration and then be sent away buzzing with ideas and information for them to absorb in their own time.
To me, driving instructing is about giving someone the ability to enjoy a fantastic, exhilarating pastime that they can carry out professionally and safely if they follow the guidance they have been given by their ADI.”
– Simon Cook on what driving instruction means to him.
What is your favourite part of the job?
I love those first few moments when somebody moves off in a car for the first time. You really don’t know how they are going to react – and nor do they! It’s completely unscripted. Some squeal and whoop; some don’t breath and turn a strange colour; some can’t use the steering wheel and forget they have feet. Seriously though, I love it because you are giving someone a brand new experience in a controlled, safe environment and that is hugely satisfying.
And of course, there’s the other end of the training cycle too where you enjoy the shared success of a pass that you know will help transform that young person’s life. Finally, it’s hugely rewarding working with people who have their own challenges to overcome, and not just the driving test. For instance, I taught a lovely man in his early 30s who has autism. It took 18 months of training but he passed his test first time. The thing is if I had told him on the very first day of training that he was going to pass, he would have probably thought it was easier to raise the Titanic.
What’s the worst part of the job?
I don’t enjoy training people who don’t want to be in the car; a lot of youngsters feel obligated to learn to drive at the age of 17 or 18 because some high achieving families see their offspring learning as something that must be ticked off life’s shopping list as soon as possible. This negative attitude puts the youngster under pressure to get behind the wheel and crack on.
It ends up being a chore for the teenager, yet another pressure – and they have enough of those as it is. Ultimately, learning to drive should be satisfying, exhilarating and rewarding. For any youngsters who feels they are under pressure to learn, I would recommend they wait until they are ready and willing to go for it.
Turning to ADIs, what are your thoughts about the current state of the industry?
The truth is that we must as an industry seek to improve. A genuine push for continual professional development should be mandatory with ADIs forced to develop their skillsets. Currently, there is no requirement or incentive for anybody in the industry to better themselves in terms of their knowledge and expertise, well, other than Standards Check but that is too infrequent and something that is simply feared by some, instead of being seen as important.
Instead, we need an OFSTED-like approach where we are checked regularly to ensure that we’re growing and improving as ADIs. I think it should be a mandatory requirement that all ADIs have 15-20 hours a year of compulsory training. This training should focus on advancing their expertise, keeping them abreast of current legislation and any changes to it or the test process, and critically, being more involved in the industry itself.
Finally, why do you use Theory Test Pro? Because I love it. My students never stop raving about it either because it’s so faithful to the actual tests. It’s also updated, accessible and simply works – plus I love its management and reporting features.
For me as a business user, it’s useful too – I can offer the parent who calls up a service then and there, turning on Theory Test Pro and showing them its benefits immediately. For some parents, that ability is extremely impressive and can be a real deal clincher.
