Do I need tuition before returning to driving?
Refresher lessons or familiarisation tuition would often be of benefit before returning to independent driving.
If a return to driving, following accident or illness, is planned, a short course of driving tuition may be advised. This could be general refresher tuition to update your skills or get you back into driving after a period away from it, or if a change of vehicle control is required (changing to an automatic or using adapted controls) then familiarisation tuition may be needed.
If a driving assessment has been undertaken, a short course of tuition may be considered essential and a report back from the driving instructor would be needed to conclude the assessment; in some situations the tuition would be followed by a review assessment to ensure that the tuition has been successful.
If DVLA are making medical enquiries a favourable tuition report would help them to conclude their enquiries more quickly and may be considered essential especially if the assessment report recommended tuition.
To find a local driving instructor who may be able to help with this sort of tuition go to the “find an instructor” page.
Motability funded familiarisation tuition can usually be provided for Motability customers using adaptations for the first time; the normal process for this is that the customer would pay cash for the driving lessons and they should ask the instructor for a receipt which would be sent to Motability who would then reimburse the customer. Contact Motability on 0300 456 4566 for details. However, if a more expensive and complex adaptation is required and this is funded by a charitable grant from the Motability Foundation then they should be contacted to arrange the familiarisation training on 0800 500 3186.
Motability would normally fund the cost of 5-10 hours familiarisation training and state on their website that: “We find that most people only need up to five hours of familiarisation lessons, however we may pay for additional hours if you need them”.
After completing 10 hours familiarisation training, if sufficient progress has not been made for the client to reach a safe driving standard, it is recommended that advice be sought from the local Driving Mobility assessment centre https://www.drivingmobility.org.uk/find-a-centre/ to decide how to proceed.
Updated 21.02.2022