Guide for learners

What Actually Happens on Test Day

Nearly everyone who takes a practical test is more nervous about the unknowns than about the driving. So here is the whole thing, in order, as it happens at the Fairvale centre.
What Actually Happens on Test Day

Before you go in

Your instructor collects you an hour early and takes you for a warm-up drive, usually twenty minutes on roads near the centre. Bring your provisional licence and your theory certificate number. That is all you need.

The eyesight check

In the car park, the examiner asks you to read a number plate roughly twenty metres away. If you wear glasses for driving, wear them. Fail this and the test ends there, which happens about once a year and is always avoidable.

Show me, tell me

Two questions about the car. One answered before you set off ("tell me how you would check the brakes are working"), one while driving ("show me how you would wash the windscreen"). Getting one wrong is a single minor. It is not worth losing sleep over.

The drive

Around forty minutes. Twenty of it is independent driving, following either signs to a destination or a sat nav the examiner sets up. One reversing manoeuvre. Possibly an emergency stop, which about one test in three includes.

The result

They pull up back at the centre, turn to you and tell you straight away. Then they go through the sheet, minor by minor. Your instructor usually sits in for that part, and it is the most useful ten minutes of feedback you will get either way.

If it does not go your way

You can rebook after ten working days. Most people who fail do so on one specific thing, and it is normally fixable in three or four hours. It is not a verdict on whether you can drive.

First lesson, no commitment

Book one lesson and see

Tell us where you are and when you are free. We will match you to an instructor and call you back the same day.