Special and specific needs
Every person is an individual and every individual learns differently.
A good specialist driving instructor will understand this and tailor the tuition to the individual’s needs. A specialist instructor will have experience of the different medical conditions but will understand that one person’s condition will be different to another’s even if the diagnosis is the same.
Autism, Dyslexia/Dyscalculia, Dyspraxia, ADHD and ADD and associated problems may well cause some difficulties with learning to drive. Learning in a standard manual car is frequently perfectly feasible and an average driving instructor may be perfectly capable of providing appropriate tuition to get the pupil up to test standard. Often though standard teaching techniques do not work, the driving instructor needs to be creative and find an alternative teaching or coaching method that does work for the individual pupil.
An experienced specialist instructor is more likely to understand the condition and recognise the individual pupil’s needs, they would also be more likely to have more experience of different solutions that may be tailored to create an individual tuition package that suits the individual pupil and embraces the positivity, patience and perseverance that will hopefully encourage them to succeed and achieve their goals. It may be that learning in a manual car is a step too far and an automatic car may be more suitable.
Experienced specialist driving instructors will also be more aware of the different techniques that may help with the learning process for the theory test. Often specialist one to one help can be provided along with assistance with the booking process for taking the test to ensure that all possible special needs provision is applied for (extra time is allowed for the multiple choice test and the services of a reader/recorder may also be provided).
Special needs provision can also be requested for the practical test to ensure that communication difficulties between the examiner and pupil do not compromise the pupils driving ability.