Passing your practical driving test with ELITE Driving School

Your ELITE instructor will cover a detailed syllabus of lessons based around The National Standards for Learning to Drive to ensure you are fully prepared to be a safe, confident, responsible and independent driver.

Your progress and your reflections on your progress can be logged on our Total Drive App.

You will also be fully prepared for what to expect on the day of your driving test, whether it be at:

Mitcham, West Wickham, Redhill Aerodrome, Crawley, Burgess Hill, Morden, or any of the other driving test centres within our catchment area.

Practical test government page

Booking your driving test

To book your Practical Driving Test make sure you use the official Government website.  DO NOT BOOK through any third-party booking sites that will come up in Google searches.

Many of these will offer guaranteed pass or free retests. However, the initial booking is more expensive, you won’t be able to choose the date and time for your test, and often their misleading terms and conditions mean that you won’t be able to change or cancel your test without losing what you’ve paid.

Through the official DVSA site you can change or cancel your test up to 3 working days before your test without loss of fee, and change it up to 10 times.

Getting an earlier test date

If your instructor agrees that you are ready to take your test sooner than the date you’ve booked, then you can check the DVSA system to see if earlier dates become available.

Unfortunately, this relies on a bit of luck. Dates do become available if other candidates cancel, examiners are issued overtime, or a new examiner is deployed to a test centre.

However, as new slots do become available, they tend to get snapped up quickly. If you haven’t got the time to keep logging on and checking yourself then you can use a third-party cancellation checking service.

When it comes to doing this, your instructor can probably advise you what Apps are generating test slots for their other pupils at that time, as performance of these Apps do vary, as do the costs of the services.

The Apps will keep on checking for you, and when test slots become available text you the details, or some even move the booking for you.

Make sure that you check that your instructor can accommodate your new date before changing it though, otherwise you might end up losing the slot completely.

Get an earlier driving test

What does the practical test involve?

The Practical Driving Test involves you driving for around 40 minutes on various road types and conditions, 20 minutes of independent driving (following sat nav or road signs) carrying out one reversing manoeuvre, and possibly an emergency stop.

Eye chart test for driving

Eyesight check

The first part of the test involves the examiner asking you to read a vehicle number plate at a distance of 20 metres (new style post 2000 plate) or 20.5 metres (old pre 2000 style plate) to check your eyesight.

Not being able to read the number plate at the required distance will result in the distance being measured out accurately by another examiner before you are allowed to try a second time.

Failing to read it on a second attempt will result in a serious fault being recorded and the test terminated before you even sit in the car, and your test fee lost.

An eyesight check is the first thing that your ELITE instructor will do with you on your first lesson, so please make sure if you wear glasses or contact lenses that you bring them with you on your first and every driving lesson.

Show Me / Tell Me Questions

You will be asked one of a possible 14 simple ‘tell me’ vehicle safety questions at the start of the test.

These include how to check that the vehicle lights are working and how they are operated, how to open the bonnet and check the engine fluid levels, and how to operate and check various other items and controls on the vehicle.  You will then be asked one of another possible 7 ‘show me’ questions during some point of the drive, such as ‘when safe to do so, show me how you clean your front windscreen using your screen washers and wipers’.  This can happen at any point during the test. You will receive a driver fault mark for each question answered incorrectly. However, if you are distracted whilst trying to carry out this exercise, it could result in a serious fault being given, for example if you swerve onto the wrong side of the road.

You can view these questions in full, including a full explanation of the answers on our ‘Show Me / Tell Me Questions‘ page.

Your instructor will go through the questions with you in more detail, and familiarise you with the controls of the vehicle that you are taking your lessons in, and therefore you will be taking your test in.

Show me tell me questions
Reverse parallel park

Reversing Manoeuvre

Throughout the drive you will be asked by the examiner to perform one of the following exercises:

  • Forward parking into a bay in a car park, and reversing out
  • Reverse parking in and driving out of a bay in a car park
  • Pull up on the right-hand side of the road, reverse for 2 car lengths, and rejoin the traffic
  • Parallel Park at the side of the road behind a parked vehicle

For these exercises you will be required to deliver smooth and accurate operation of the controls of the vehicle, whilst carrying out effective observations to ensure that you and everyone around you are safe through planning and risk assessment.  Note that the DVSA still recognise the turn in the road and left reverse manoeuvres as valuable manoeuvres to learn to help develop these skills.

Emergency Stop

1 in 3 candidates may be asked to perform an emergency stop.

For this exercise the examiner will pull you over at the side of the road and explain that shortly he / she will be giving you a signal to stop the car (this signal varies, but each examiner will demonstrate the signal they will give). Once they have given you the instruction, they will then ask you to drive on again as normal before shortly giving you the signal.

As soon as they have given you the signal to stop, you will need to demonstrate that you can stop the car as quickly and safely as possible (as if a child had run in front of the car) and under full control.

Driving test stop test
Independent driving with elite driving

Independent Driving

For twenty minutes, around half of the test, you will be asked to drive independently. This was increased from ten minutes as from 4th December 2017.

During the independent driving part of the test, most candidates will be asked to follow directions from a sat nav. The sat nav will be pre-programmed and set up by the examiner. Therefore, you will not be expected to touch the device. If you are not sure of the instruction being given by the device, you will be able to ask the examiner for confirmation.

This is not a test of your navigation skills, and if you do not follow the exact route you will not receive a fault mark providing you are safe in the route you take. The device or examiner will help with directions to get you back on route.

One in 5 driving tests won’t use a sat nav, and you will instead be asked to follow traffic signs towards a certain destination.