Meet the Parents

We've been enjoying the excellent road safety community over at Co-Pilot, ably hosted by  Elizabeth Box and  James Evans. 

One of the latest papers to be shared on the site focuses on "Teen Driving Experience and Exposure". 
(Outcomes of Variability in Teen Driving Experience and Exposure
Evidence from Naturalistic Driving Studies
(2025))

One of the key findings from this research showed that US teens who had access to their own vehicle had higher safety-critical event (SCE) rates compared to teens who shared a family vehicle. 

From the paper, "This finding suggests that delayed or restricted solo access could help mitigate crash risk during the critical early months of independent driving." 

This paper is not the main point of this post, however. The point of this post is our position that parents deserve to be aware of this kind of data when considering purchasing a new vehicle for their 17/18-year olds. Good data helps decision-making. 

In the UK, however, communication between parents of learner drivers and driving instructors can often be a challenging process for several reasons: 

1) Many parents believe the process of arranging lessons and communicating with ADIs is best left to the young person, as a way of building responsibility in the latter. While this may be beneficial to an extent, it does mean that parents are often omitted from the process completely, leading to an outdated picture of what learning to drive in the 2020s is really like. 

2) Many driving instructors would prefer not to engage with parents. This can be the result of experiences of managing persistent queries over readiness for test, disputes around additional lessons, price, etc. 

3) Driving instructors are not trained or assessed in communication techniques as they apply to parents. Communicating effectively with parents requires a different skillset, a different approach, and - probably - some professional resources to assist with messaging. 

At Bright Coaching, we work with driving instructors to shift the paradigm that exists around driving lessons. IE minimal parental involvement; instructor-led approaches where the pupil is being told how to pass a driving test; get the test out of the way, the rest is common sense. 

Contracting for a young driver's success and including parents in this process is one way to build a team-ethos around the training, and it also lays the groundwork for future collaboration and data-sharing.

How many parents are aware that their children have a one-in-five chance of being involved in a road crash once they pass their test? How many know that if their child has two of their peers as passengers, that they are four times as likely to be involved in a crash? These statistics, generally speaking, are known all too well by driving instructors. 

There is a great deal of work that can be done to bridge the gap between instructors and parents. Thank you to the team at Co-Pilot for drawing attention to it.