Time to reflect

If ever there were a time when our driving instructor associations could really start showing their value, you would think it might be now?  I've just had posted through my door issue 3 of the 'driver trainer' magazine.  We have one of the biggest shake-ups to our industry and the countries economy that we have all witnessed in our lifetime; that magazine is a poor product to its customers. 

I notice the big national franchisors are not slow in creating full-page advertisements in the above magazine in this time of uncertainty.  Capitalising on peoples fears is not an attractive look.  It is a symptom of what continues to anchor down our industry in the gutter.  Big national franchise companies are attempting to get ADI's in this time of uncertainty to sign up to contracts with financial commitments of £150-£250 per week.  Utterly appalling.  No-one seems to care.  Our associations far from acting as some kind of protection to these underhanded techniques are one of the mechanisms in which these big nationals market to us.  When I attend a driving instructor conference, the mixture of industry award giving and presence of the DVSA tends to go to the organisers heads.  These instructor associations tend to join in with the tiresome message from the DVSA of instructor policing.  Standards check testing appears to be the be all and end all.  Rather than acting on behalf of 40,000 instructors across the country, the conference appears to be centred around the fear of poor instruction, and training courses.    

But this has always been the way.  When are instructors properly treated as customers?  It is rare.  I've noted previously on this blog that courses and conferences that I attend do not get completed with Customer Surveys; if we were genuinely being treated like customers, then our feedback should be both desired and acted upon.  The culture within the industry is top-down in compliance.  The DVSA are quite rightly not slow in making it clear that driving instructors should provide value to their customers, but when does the voice of ADI's get listened to and acted upon?  Have you ever known a driving instructor association actually survey instructors about how they can help?  You would think that an organisation that represents 11,000 odd instructors might actually be keen to deliver enhancements to them.  This doesn't happen, because they don't actually ask instructors how they can help.  Perhaps they are frightened of being held to account?    

For those of you who deliberately do not monitor social media, ADI's have a voice, and many are shouting loud and clear.  Fear and frustration abound.  A phenomenal number of instructors now recognise the downside of having weekly/monthly financial commitments with franchisors.  With BIG TOM there is no franchise fee; if the franchisee does not work, the franchisee does not pay.  I like to keep things simple, you see.

HMG has decided to keep running driving tests for critical workers.  So, in theory, DVSA examiners are breaching the 2-metre distance rule for these workers.  In theory, there may be driving instructors providing driving training for customers who are critical workers so that they can then take a driving test.  I struggle to justify this breach of the national directives given; it seems to me to go against the grain somewhat.  I was due to give a course of driving training to a prison officer at a prison in Peterborough starting the day of the lockdown instigation.  Between the two of us, we had come to the conclusion that it was unwise and this was before the PM had even made the 5 pm announcement.  As we have all witnessed though, in times of national crisis, common sense is often lacking in human behaviour.