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The parents' campaign for safe driving tuition
Learn and Live has spent the last ten years campaigning for improvements
in this field. Many of its supporters have personal experience of how easily things can go wrong, resulting in dreadful loss of life and serious injuries.
Learn and Live totally supports stretching out the learning period.
Drivers should be required to spend a year gaining a driving licence, rather than competing with each other to gain a licence quickly.
Pre-driver training courses should be available at a reasonable cost, followed at 17, by a provisional licence period in which the theory test, including hazard perception training and testing, is completed.
Practical driving instruction should be ongoing, with professional instruction and responsible supervision and the driving test should not be taken until candidates have had sufficient time to build experience and anticipate road hazards.
This should then be followed by a 2 year probationary period.
The views expressed by certain motoring organisations are of deep concern to us. Statements that delaying the test for a year, by law, will merely push back the high crash levels among novice drivers are not supported by the evidence. Experience and age are both important factors. Better-prepared and more mature drivers should reduce crashes. Hazard perception should be part of driver training, but time is needed so this can be applied to real roads and situations, if we really want to save lives.
The Government wants everyone to have access to computers to deal with the modern world. Surely training in safer driving ought to have equal priority?
Why not subsidise training for poorer applicants? Perhaps people should consider their own priorities and put driver training before designer clothing!
By acting now we can produce new generations of safer drivers and we will all benefit.
Notes For Editors:
Learn and Live was started in 1989 by Vicki Stone following the death of her daughter in a road accident in which a learner driver ignored instructions from his newly-qualified supervising driver. In 1990, in response to a high level of press and media interest the necessary legislation was introduced, requiring supervising drivers to be at least 21 and with 3 years’ experience as a full licence holder.
Sadly other parents lost their youngsters and the campaign expanded in response to the circumstances surrounding these continuing deaths arising from over-confidence and inexperience. Many of the common-sense objectives originally proposed by the campaign in its early years are now on the statute books and our current proposals are supported by other major organisations, members of the public, MPs and Road Safety Professionals.
The campaign is run on a purely voluntary basis by committed individuals, who receive no financial rewards. No membership fees are required. Its contribution to the increased attention to the whole area of young driver accident rates has been acknowledged by successive Roads Ministers and Awards, most recently a Certificate of Commendation from Prince Michael Road Safety Awards.
Vicki Stone was awarded the MBE in the 1994 New Year Honours list.
Those parents who are committed to Learn and Live are inspired by their determination to save other families from the despair that follows such unnecessary road deaths.
Further information is available on our Website: http://www.learnandlive.org.uk
Learn and Live has a CD - ROM resource available which contains extensive Road Safety material and information about the campaign. This is free to appropriate applicants.
Enquiries to:
Vicki Stone
Tel/Fax: 01384-292571
E-mail: office@learnandlive.org.uk
Website:www.learnandlive.org.uk
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