Talk to me about booking driving lessons

[Plasmodesmata]

Yes, I realise there's been a pandemic and there is a huge backlog of potential learners and everyone is very busy. But I can't even get on a waiting list because nobody even calls me back, I've just left messages into a void. Has anyone had any luck booking lessons recently? Should I just give up for now and wait a year? Try and teach him myself? (this is for son who is 17 soon).

It might help if you changed your thread title to include your location, so ‘Wanted: good (and available) driving instructor in x place

I sent endless messages on messenger, Facebook and enquired on my local community Facebook page. Lots were booked up for months, but I found someone eventually.

MindtheGap - I'm not really after a specific recommendation. More just to see if it's a common problem or if I'm just not trying hard enough!

it's quite common.

Some instructors have left the job, after being unable to work for so long because of Covid.

Many are full to capacity because of the backlog, as you say - as far as I can tell the backlog of lessons is actually worse than the backlog of tests. Because the availability of instructors limits the number of people ready for test - nobody was learning over lockdowns (except those being taught by family), so the number of tests missed wasn't increasing week-by-week like the number of missed lessons.

You might want to try a neighbouring town, if you have that option? Certainly test availability varies hugely across areas, it might well be true for instructors too.

You might want to do some teaching yourself but recommend to get at least some lessons from an instructor, to ensure he's test ready. Experienced drivers often do a lot automatically and it's surprisingly hard to pass on all the knowledge you have. (And that's ignoring the bad driving habits most of us have, and changes to highway code since we learned).

Good luck!

Thanks Toby. I'm not really serious about teaching him myself - I'd be crap at it. We'd fall out big time, too. I remember my dad trying to teach me - I stopped the car, got out and walked home as I was so annoyed with him.