My Learner Driver

What is the examiner actually doing from the back seat on your Part 3? Diana sits down with Wayne Pinnington, who spent more than 20 years with DSA and DVSA as a car examiner, an ADI examiner, and then a test centre manager and LDTM, at one point running seven test centres and 22 staff between Wrexham and Buxton. He qualified as an ADI himself in 1999, and he is now back in the ADI world as a training consultant.

Diana opens this one with a confession. When she was qualifying she had done the reading, sat through the Zooms, learned the theory, and genuinely expected to be the bee's knees the moment she started teaching. She wasn't. Not because the theory was wrong, but because she had never actually done the job. The knowing and the doing turned out to be two completely different things, and finding that out knocked her belief in herself sideways.

Emma Fonnaland posted a list called "controversial things I do as a driving instructor". It did over 300,000 views and the comments filled with instructors telling her she was wrong. Phil read it, found he disagreed with almost none of it, and got her on the podcast to work through the list one item at a time.

Faults are the evidence. Needs are the cause. If you only ever fix the thing you saw, you will be fixing it again next week. This episode is about the gap between those two words, and why it decides more Part 3 and Standards Check results than almost anything else on the form. Competency 1 asks whether the trainer identified the pupil's learning goals and needs. Phil has never seen an instructor score a 1 there and still walk away with a pass, because when that one goes wrong everything after it is built on sand. You can deliver a genuinely good lesson on the wrong thing. A pupil stalls. A pupil misses a blind spot. A pupil sits in second when they should be in third. Every one of those is a moment, and every one of them has something underneath it. The job is to keep asking "yeah, but why" until you find what that something is. The difference matters more than it sounds. Fix the fault and you get a pupil who remembers not to do it, at least for the rest of the lesson. Fix the need and you get a pupil who understands, which lasts, and which fixes every other place that same gap was going to show up. Phil works through two examples in detail. The gear change, where "change up at 20mph" quietly teaches a learner a rule instead of a reason, and where the honest question to any instructor is whether they actually do that themselves. And the blind spot, where "I just forgot" is never the end of the conversation. Ask a pupil whether they forget to look before crossing the road and the answer is no, because they have evidence that one is dangerous and no evidence yet that the other one is. Which tells you the need. And it might not be the need you expected. Sometimes it is awareness of risk. Sometimes it is pure cognitive overload, a pupil with so much going on at their feet that there is no brain space left to look. Those two look identical from the passenger seat and they need completely different lessons. One more thing worth saying out loud: you do not need the fault to happen in order to find the need. You can spot it in something a pupil says, or simply from knowing where they are in their journey. Waiting for the mistake is a choice, not a requirement. What we cover What separates a fault from a need, and why the driving test trains all of us to see only the first one Standards Check and Part 3 competency 1, and why it quietly decides the rest of the sheet Why a pupil who remembers is fragile and a pupil who understands is not The gear change example: what "change at 20mph" actually teaches, and what it leaves out The blind spot example: why "I just forgot" is the start of the conversation, not the end Telling risk awareness apart from cognitive overload, and why the fix is different for each Finding a need before the fault ever happens

This one came straight out of a question in our Skool community, and it's the argument that splits every instructor Facebook group going: do you step in and be proactive, or do you let the pupil make the mistake and learn from it?