Inspire Instructor Training Podcast

Phil Cowley
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The Instructor Training Podcast is aimed at Driving Instructors and Trainee Driving Instructors wanting to improve their lessons and pass their Standards Check or Part 3. Our aim is to break it down and make it simple. 

I will be joined by some of the best trainers and Adi’s in the business along with chats with Pdi’s to gain their perspective on the process of becoming an instructor.

  1. 5d ago

    Passing Part 3: What The Examiner Actually Sees

    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. The first thing Wayne clears up will surprise a lot of PDIs. The chat you have with the examiner before the lesson carries no weight in the marking. It gives the examiner a picture of what the lesson should look like, and the more detail you give, the less they need to probe. After that, only the evidence in the car counts, and the whole lesson is assessed together back in the test centre. He is just as clear on another point: everyone starts a Part 3 on a pass, and every examiner wants to give one. From there they get into how the marking really works. The examiner is looking at what the highest risk is, and whether you have seen it and are doing something about it. Deal with the high risk and you are heading for a pass. How far you go with the lower risk issues is often the difference between a B and an A. And when an examiner marks a competency as a 3, it means they could not give you a single piece of advice to improve it. They also cover whether manoeuvres are allowed on a Part 3 (they are, if it is a real lesson and not a quick recap), why beginner lessons disappeared after Covid, how obvious a staged lesson looks from the back, and why PDIs are so often 10 to 15 seconds too late with their instruction. Diana shares what she has seen when pupils are used to having a trainer in the back, and Wayne gives his one piece of advice for the night before your test. What we cover: - Why the pre lesson chat with the examiner is not marked, and why it still matters - How the examiner builds a holistic picture and decides the result - Risk based marking, and what separates a Grade B from a Grade A - What a score of 3 really means - Manoeuvres, beginner lessons and what counts as a realistic Part 3 lesson - Staged lessons, over instruction and being proactive - How the Part 3 differs from a standards check Key takeaways: - Give the examiner plenty of detail before the lesson: hours with you, private practice, driving history. It saves them probing, but the marking only starts when the wheels turn. - Find the highest risk your pupil is showing right now and work on that first. Everything else comes after. - Being proactive means planning around the pupil's needs before you set off. It does not mean talking more. - Get your pupils used to someone sitting in the back long before test day, so the examiner in the mirror is nothing new. - When a pupil makes one mistake, ask why before you fix it. Do not reteach something they have done well for the last 20 minutes. - The night before: teach the pupil next to you what they need, keep them safe, and keep it simple. Mentioned in this episode: - Wayne Pinnington Driver Training Consultancy on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61590239812561 - Email Wayne: waynepinningtonitc@gmail.com - Wayne works across Merseyside and Cheshire and offers online consultations for everywhere else. Want to train with Inspire? www.inspireinstructortraining.co.uk

    Passing Part 3: What The Examiner Actually Sees

  2. Sep 16

    Belief Needs Evidence, Action Comes First

    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. That gap is what this episode is about. Visualisation, positive thinking, backing yourself, they are all real skills and Diana is not dismissing any of them. But belief needs evidence, and the only thing that produces evidence is action. You can believe you will be the best instructor on the planet and it will stay a belief forever if you never change what you do in the car on Monday. The clearest example is the one nearly every PDI recognises. Someone sits in the back and the lesson stops going like a normal lesson. You hear yourself say it afterwards: I wouldn't normally do that. And yet the exam you have to pass is somebody sitting in the back watching you teach. So the action is obvious and uncomfortable in equal measure. Get people in the back, regularly. Your trainer, another PDI, an ADI, the learner's mum. Two of those four are free. If that feels too big a step today, record yourself instead, dash cam or a phone in a holder facing backwards so you are not watching your own face. Diana then works the same logic through levels of instruction and through digging deeper, and finishes by turning it back on learner drivers, because a pupil saying "I just need to be more confident at roundabouts" is making exactly the same mistake we are. What we cover: - Why belief without action is treading water, and why the brain needs evidence before it will believe anything - The knowing and doing gap, and the tell Diana spots in PDIs who have the theory but not the reps - Getting people in the back of the car, and the free ways to do it - Recording yourself, dash cam versus phone, and which is less intrusive - Bringing levels of instruction to conscious competence, with the "I can go after that blue car, can't I?" example - Building a bank of questions when digging deeper is the skill that keeps letting you down - Why "I just need more practice" is a sweeping statement that helps nobody, pupil or instructor - Borrowing belief from the process when your own belief is low Key takeaways: - Isolate one skill. Not three. One, for the next fortnight. - Book somebody into the back of a lesson this week, even if it is a family member. - If that is too much today, record one lesson and watch it back. - When you inadvertently step in, note it. Then ask afterwards whether it was actually needed. - Replace "I need more confidence" with "what specifically would give me that confidence?", for yourself and for your pupils. - Ask yourself Diana's closing question: what is the one action you are taking this week, and how will you know if it worked? Want to train with Inspire? www.inspireinstructortraining.co.uk

    Belief Needs Evidence, Action Comes First

  3. Sep 8

    10 Controversial Things This ADI Does Differently

    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. What comes out is not really a list of quirks. It is one idea applied ten different ways: do not steer your pupils around the hard thing, take them into it while you are still sat next to them. Snow. Motorways. The drive home after the test. A toddler yapping in the back seat. Emma's own line is the one worth keeping: you learn from experiences, not explanations. Some of it will land straight away. Some of it will annoy you. Phil went in disagreeing about mock tests and came out having changed his mind on letting learners drive home after the test, which is worth the listen on its own. What we cover: - Why Emma has never taught a test route, and what she does instead at the junctions that genuinely catch people out - The case against mock tests, and Phil's counter-argument for running them as a pressure rehearsal rather than a driving assessment - Taking every learner on the motorway before they pass, and why this should not be controversial at all - Ditching reference points completely, and what happens when a borrowed reference stops working in a different car - Why a firm lesson plan can make you a worse instructor, and the difference between a plan and a direction - Letting learners drive home after the test, and the reasoning that flips every objection on its head - Not publishing a pass rate, and the type of enquiry that stops arriving once you stop - Eye mirrors, lessons in the snow, and pupils bringing their kids along Key takeaways: - A plan is a direction, not a route. If you cannot abandon it at the first junction, it is doing your pupil a disservice. Worth hearing twice if you are working towards Part Three. - Teach the principle, not the place. Knowing your local roundabout is useful. Being unable to drive an unfamiliar one is a fail waiting to happen. - A reference point you handed them is yours, not theirs. If they build their own, make sure it can flex. - Ask what your pass rate is actually recruiting. Publish it and you attract people who want you to get them through. Stop publishing it and you attract people who want to learn to drive. - Pick one thing you currently avoid because it is hard, and put it into a lesson this week. Mentioned in this episode: - Emma Fonnaland, Wheelwise Driving School. Wheelwise Emma on TikTok and Instagram, Wheelwise Driving School on Facebook. - Oli Taylor, on hazard management: be a spectator, not a participant. Want to train with Inspire? www.inspireinstructortraining.co.uk

    10 Controversial Things This ADI Does Differently

  4. Sep 2

    Stop Fixing Faults, Start Finding Needs

    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 oneStandards Check and Part 3 competency 1, and why it quietly decides the rest of the sheetWhy a pupil who remembers is fragile and a pupil who understands is notThe gear change example: what "change at 20mph" actually teaches, and what it leaves outThe blind spot example: why "I just forgot" is the start of the conversation, not the endTelling risk awareness apart from cognitive overload, and why the fix is different for eachFinding a need before the fault ever happens Key takeaways Treat the fault as evidence, not as the problem. Ask why. Then ask why again."I forgot" is a symptom. Keep digging until you reach something you can actually teach.Fix the need and you fix every future instance of it, not just the one on that roundabout.If a pupil is overloaded, take work off them first and hand it back as their control improves.You can identify a need without waiting for the mistake.Do not literally say "yeah, but why" to a pupil. Fluff the question up a bit. Mentioned in this episode The previous episode on not letting mistakes happenStandards Check and Part 3 competency 1: identifying the pupil's learning goals and needs Want to train with Inspire? www.inspireinstructortraining.co.uk

    Stop Fixing Faults, Start Finding Needs

  5. Aug 26

    Should You Let Your Pupil Make The Mistake?

    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? Phil's answer is that it's a false choice. Both are right. Both work. The whole thing hangs on when you use each one, and why — and on the fact that "learning from mistakes" and "learning from experience" are not the same thing, even though we use them as if they are. It's also the first of the new shorter format: 10–15 minute episodes, one topic, no waffle. What we cover: - Why proactive coaching and experiential learning aren't opposites, and what actually decides which one you reach for - The trainer-in-the-back test: would you rather flounder for half an hour, or be redirected and shown what good feels like? - The same roundabout approach played two ways — coached proactively, and left to go wrong - How to get the thinking without the spoon-feeding, using the conversation before the event - The three places where letting them experiment is absolutely the right call - The pupil stuck in third at the lights — safe to let them stall, but is it the right thing to do? Key takeaways: - A positive experience they can reflect on beats a failure they have to recover from. Most pupils learn more from "that went well, why?" than from "that went badly, why?" - Stop calling it a mistake. In a car park it's an experiment. The goal isn't finishing the bay, the goal is learning how the car behaves — say that out loud to your pupil. - Do your thinking work before the event, not after it. Ask what might make them slow down on the approach, then let them meet it. Now it's something they worked out, not something you told them, and it sticks. - Deliberately explore the extremes in a safe space. Gas harder than you should — what happens? Barely any — what happens? Clutch up fast, then as slow as you can. Let them find the middle. - "It's safe" is not the same as "it's the right thing to do." If they're about to pull away in third with nothing behind you, you can let it happen — but ask whether the negative feeling earns its place. - The bit most instructors skip: if you do rescue them, still analyse it. Same conversation, same reasons, same depth as if they'd stalled in traffic. Rescuing and then moving on as though nothing happened is where the learning gets lost. Mentioned in this episode: - Our Skool community — where this week's question came from - 100+ hours of training content at www.inspireinstructortraining.co.uk Want to train with Inspire? www.inspireinstructortraining.co.uk

    Should You Let Your Pupil Make The Mistake?

  6. Feb 27

    Intelligent Instructor "Facilitator of Excellence''

    GuestRachael Butler — Sales & Marketing Director, Intelligent Instructor 10 years at Intelligent Instructor (joined ~6 months after launch)Curates and organises content for Intelligent Instructor PlusRuns 24 online events per year (12 masterclasses + 12 member webinars)Heavily involved in national events: sponsorship/exhibitors and event delivery What we coverWhat Rachael’s role actually involves (and why she calls herself a “facilitator of excellence”)Intelligent Instructor Plus: what it includes, why it’s built around ongoing CPD, and how members use itBurnout, boundaries, and the reality of high workload (plus what’s helped Rachael personally)Why CPD improves more than performance: confidence, mindset, and long-term professional developmentThe real shift happening in the industry: increased competition and why differentiation matters more than everStanding out without overwhelm: defining your “why you”, not trying to copy the loudest accountsDiversifying: fleet, young driver, offender rehab, PDI training, and other routes to build resilienceEvents breakdown:National Conference & Expo (September): large-scale, multiple zones/stages, huge expo hallThe Convention: smaller, more intimate, single-stage immersion, mindset + business developmentHow to get maximum value from events: curiosity, stretching beyond your comfort zone, and implementing one practical changeYour “advice handover” segment: leaving guidance for the next guest Key takeawaysDon’t do all the CPD. Do the CPD that fits you — consistently.Differentiation isn’t about being flashy — it’s about being clear. Who you help, how you teach, and what you stand for.A full diary isn’t always success — you need time for reflection, business admin, finances, CPD, and rest.Events work best when you attend sessions you wouldn’t normally choose and then apply one change immediately.Small changes compound — “one thing at a time” adds up fast over a year. Memorable momentsThe candid chat about burnout, boundaries, and learning to respond less “immediately”The industry reality check: rising numbers coming into the sector means standing out matters more than everThe Convention vs Expo reflection: why being “exposed to everything” can be more valuable than choosing only familiar sessionsThe advice baton at the end:“Do one thing this year that pushes you outside your comfort zone.” Mentioned in the episodeIntelligent Instructor Plus membership (online platform with hundreds of resources + monthly webinar)National Conference & Expo (September)The Convention (smaller, immersive event + awards dinner)Diversifying ideas: fleet, young driver, rehabilitation/speed awareness, training routesTools and habits: time blocking, “two-minute try”, and managing workload boundaries Connect with Rachael / Intelligent InstructorIntelligent Instructor website: intelligentinstructor.co.ukEmail: rachael@intelligentinstructor.co.uk If you enjoyed the episode, share it with an instructor friend who’s trying to grow their business without burning out — and tell me your biggest takeaway.

    Intelligent Instructor "Facilitator of Excellence''

  7. Jan 9

    PDA, Trust And Standards Checks

    ]Episode summary: In this episode, Diana Todd is joined by Kat Tomkinson (Driving Instructor Kat) to discuss PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) and how it can show up in driving lessons when autonomy feels threatened. Kat shares practical ways to reduce demand, build trust, and keep learning non-judgemental — including using hypothetical scenarios and adapting communication. The conversation also covers Kat’s standards check: what the pressure felt like, how she reframed it positively, and how she prepared for success. What we cover: Kat’s journey into instructing after the COVID period and what she enjoys most about the jobWhy many pupils / Instructors experience “resistance” that may actually be a nervous system responsePDA explained as autonomy threat → fight/flight/freeze/fall responseHow seemingly neutral questions (“What could be improved?”) can sometimes trigger defensivenessPractical lesson tools: visual aids, whiteboard scenarios, “future-focused” coachingWhen offering choice helps — and when choice can feel like pressureHow to build rapport and trust so learners feel safe enough to self-reflectStandards check experience: nerves, mindset, communication, and preparationPreparing for the 40-minute “snapshot” when your normal lessons are much longer Key takeaways: Reduce perceived judgement; keep language neutral and future-focusedWhen someone is triggered, “backing off” can be the most productive moveTrust and rapport can be the difference between resistance and reflectionStandards checks are easier to handle when you keep CPD ongoing and reframe it as a positive check of your service Guest links / contact: Kat Tomkinson — Driving Instructor Kat (Facebook & Instagram)Website/contact: drivinginstructorkat.blogspot.com

    PDA, Trust And Standards Checks

  8. 11/15/2025

    Celebrating The Ordinary Instructor

    In this first episode of the new look Inspire Instructor Training Podcast, host Diana Todd chats with Sarah Baldock, founder of SB Driving School in Maidstone, Kent. Together they explore what it means to be a driving instructor in today’s world — balancing life, learning, and the love of helping others succeed. Sarah shares her journey from redundancy to independence, how she uses dashcam footage to reflect on her teaching, and the unexpected lessons learned from her students. The pair also discuss social media — both the opportunities it creates and the challenges it brings — and how instructors can show up authentically online without feeling the pressure to “keep up with the Joneses.” Key Topics: - Using lesson recordings for self-reflection and CPD - Creating a safe, accountable space for pupils to give feedback - Managing negativity and staying kind on social media - Building your confidence as a mentor and ordinary instructor - The importance of compassion and community in the industry Best Quotes: “You don’t have to write a book, you don’t have to go to expos — just reflect on yourself and do the best you can. That’s enough.” – Sarah Baldock “Being ordinary isn’t a small thing. It’s being real, relatable, and making a difference — one learner, one PDI, one mentee at a time.” – *Diana Todd* “I watched my lessons back because I wanted to know what made me feel like that — why did that lesson go so well?” – *Sarah* “Creating an environment where your pupils can hold you accountable is no small feat.” – *Diana* “We need more compassion in this industry — more walking in each other’s shoes.” – *Diana*

    Celebrating The Ordinary Instructor
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About

The Instructor Training Podcast is aimed at Driving Instructors and Trainee Driving Instructors wanting to improve their lessons and pass their Standards Check or Part 3. Our aim is to break it down and make it simple. 

I will be joined by some of the best trainers and Adi’s in the business along with chats with Pdi’s to gain their perspective on the process of becoming an instructor.

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