A well-chosen, well-planned route will often have a dramatic effect on the success or failure of the training session. The route shown above might not be appropriate for a beginner!

Some instructors base their routes on local driving test areas using the same roads as the DVSA examiners. After the basics of operating the car have been mastered and the learner is starting to cope with moderate traffic, their lessons become 'random general drives' without a tight focus on any specific subject - this is far from ideal.

Test routes and 'general drives' have their place in training, but only in the final week or two leading up to the driving test. 

A 'general' route will do very little to help a learner master a specific subject. People who learn to drive in this way often take longer to learn, and their understanding might not be as deep as it otherwise would.

Instructors who teach in a 'general' way will often find the job stressful. In addition, their learners are less likely to have a 'great lesson experience' and will not be inclined to recommend their friends for lessons.

For specific subjects, you need specific routes...

Specific routes

Your chosen routes need to contain hazards and challenges directly related to the subjects you teach to meet your training objectives. 

For example, you can't do a 'roundabouts' lesson if the route doesn't contain any roundabouts!

You can't do an effective roundabouts lesson if you only encounter one roundabout every twenty minutes.

One of your first tasks when starting to work on a Trainee Licence (or ideally before you start)  is to develop a 'set' of training routes for different subjects. The routes will have the relevant features for specific learning topics and will offer sufficient repetition of those features. 

As an example, above, I mentioned roundabouts. A one-hour roundabout lesson would perhaps need provision to practise twenty roundabout approaches. However, this doesn't mean that you need a route with twenty roundabouts - three or four roundabouts would be ideal for the job. In an extreme situation, you might only have access to one roundabout (a small remote town?). If this were the case, you would need to go around the block several times to return to it.

The three routes concept

Each subject will need at least two routes, ideally, three routes.

1. A subject introduction route 

2. A development route 

3. An 'Advanced' route 

You might have read about 'nursery', 'intermediate' and 'advanced' routes in your study (referred to in The Driving Instructor's Handbook). Some instructors use the terminology 'beginner', 'practise', and 'test standard' routes to mean the same thing.

Our approach to route planning is similar to what you might have read about, but there is at least one key difference.

Traditional thinking suggests that when someone starts learning to drive, they will begin with quiet 'nursery routes' and then progress through the 'intermediate' to the 'test standard route' locations as they become more competent. There is nothing wrong with this approach as far as it goes; however, it can sometimes lead to problems if it is just taken at face value.

Consider 'overtaking' as a topic. Other than passing very slow vehicles (cyclists, etc.), overtaking is something that you would probably not teach until your learner is nearing driving test standard. 

Taking the traditional three routes idea at face value suggests that as the learner is nearing test standard, your routes will include a wide range of roads. For example, you might even include motorways (fully qualified instructors only). 

As we tend to do overtaking on busy or fast roads, the traditional 'three routes' idea might lead you to believe that it would be OK to teach overtaking for the first time on a busy road (because the learner is reaching test standard). But this could cause problems.

When learning something new, our brains work very hard; if the learning is done in an inappropriate environment, we can become stressed and overloaded.

If a learner is trying to learn and understand new ideas, the 'deep end' is not usually the best place to do it. 

It is much better to master the skill in the 'shallow end'; with this in mind, we suggest that every subject has three levels of route' complexity'. 

Regardless of where the learner has driven before, the first overtaking lesson (or mini-lesson) would be on an overtaking nursery route where the overtake would be as easy as possible. 

As the learner's overtaking skill improves, they could move on to more 'demanding' routes. The same principle applies to all lesson topics.

Two routes for the price of one!

Each time you devise a route for any given lesson topic, you are effectively getting a second route free - simply by driving around the route the other way!

But be careful.

A route that is easy in one direction might be very different when driven in the opposite direction. 

For example, a 'left-hand' route that is OK for someone venturing into traffic for the first time might need a 'test standard' driver if driven around to the right. 

While some routes might be 'reversible' almost immediately, depending on the lesson subject, other routes might not be appropriate to drive in the opposite direction until the learner has had 20 or 30 more lessons. 

Next: Some other examples of the 'modern' three routes concept...