Craig Preedy - PDI / ADI Trainer - Instruct IQ

06/10/2026

I've written a book.

After 22 years in the passenger seat, I keep hearing the same thing from parents: "I want to help with practice, but I'm terrified of teaching them bad habits."

Right now that worry matters more than ever. Lessons are hard to find, prices have gone up, and test waits are stretching for months. Families are being asked to fill the gap, often with no guidance at all.

KEEP Your Hands Off the Dashboard is written for them.

It explains what a professional instructor actually does on a lesson, where the supervising driver fits in, and how the two can work together rather than pulling in different directions. Practice at home stops being guesswork and starts backing up what's happening in the car with the instructor.

For parents, it's reassurance and a clear plan.
For instructors, it's something you can hand to families so private practice supports your lessons instead of undoing them.

Available now: https://amzn.eu/d/03OL1Abr

If you know a parent about to take on supervising duties, please share this with them.

01/10/2026

Darker mornings, darker nights, and that dip in enthusiasm that comes with them.

I've written about the quieter kind of instructor fatigue. Not tiredness, but the job going a bit stale. Clock watching. Finding a reason to finish two or three minutes early. Letting the odd thing slide.

I've been there, and I've written about what's helped me get the spark back, including something I didn't expect when I switched to automatic.

If you're feeling it this autumn, you're not alone.

https://craigpreedy.substack.com/p/when-the-clock-starts-watching-you?r=8h6gjj&utm_medium=ios

30/09/2026

Last night, four driving instructors sat down for an hour and talked.

No PowerPoint.

No CPD certificate at the end of it.

No one pretending to have all the answers.

We talked about GDE and whether we’re sometimes making something relatively straightforward unnecessarily complicated.

We talked about the National Standards and what a newly qualified instructor should actually be concentrating on during their first couple of years.

We talked about coaching.

Mindfulness.

Rapport.

Imposter syndrome.

Training other instructors.

Intensive courses and the difference between covering a topic and actually developing a skill.

And we talked about where this profession can take you if you don’t decide that getting your green badge was the end of your development.

There were disagreements. Questions. Experiences shared. A couple of book recommendations. And probably several conversations we could have carried on for another hour.

That’s increasingly what I want The PDI School to be.

Not another place telling instructors how to teach a roundabout.

A room where people who care about this job can talk about why they do what they do — and occasionally have someone make them think about it differently.

We’re moving our weekly get-together to Thursday evenings at 7pm.

PDIs are obviously welcome.

But so are ADIs who haven’t finished learning yet.

$35 a month with 7 days free.

Come and sit in the room.

A home for PDIs (and ADIs) who know there must be more. Brought to you by Instruct IQ, powered by the KEEP principle. Whatever stage - all welcome.

12/09/2026

ADI Part One — Where It All Starts

This really is where it all starts.

I spoke with someone the other day who has begun their journey to become an ADI. They’d signed up with a well-known school and yet, from their perspective, had effectively been abandoned.

No reading list. No real guidance. Emails left unanswered.

They felt like they’d been put into a system and forgotten about.

And that got me thinking about ADI Part One and, perhaps more importantly, the way we treat it as trainers.

Because Part One isn’t just something the PDI needs to get out of the way before the proper training starts.

The proper training has already started.

For an ADI trainer, Part One done properly can be beneficial not only to the PDI, but to the trainer and training school too.

This is where rapport starts to build. It’s where you begin to understand how that person learns. Where their strengths are. Where their weaknesses are. What they find easy and, more importantly, what they struggle with.

All of that becomes useful later.

Imagine sitting with that same PDI during their Part Two or Part Three training and being able to say:

“Do you remember how, in Part One, you struggled with…?”

Now you have history. You have context. You know something about the person sitting next to you.

Compare that with meeting them after they’ve passed Part One and knowing absolutely nothing about how they got there.

I think trainers are missing out.

Back to the PDI I spoke with.

They were using apps and struggling particularly with hazard perception. There had been very little support or direction.

I was genuinely sad to hear that.

But there was another problem.

When I mentioned studying, suddenly things became complicated.

STUDY!

Yes. Study.

Somehow, we seem to have reached a point where that word frightens people.

“I’m not academic.”

“I’m no good at studying.”

“I haven’t studied since school.”

Fine.

You don’t need to be academic.

But you are training to become a professional driving instructor.

How are you going to pass Part Two and Part Three without developing your knowledge? More importantly, how are you going to teach someone else if your own knowledge is built around remembering enough answers to get through a multiple-choice test?

Part One isn’t just about getting 85 out of 100 and moving on.

It’s an opportunity to start building the knowledge you’re going to need throughout the rest of your career.

The Highway Code. Driving – the essential skills. ADI 1. The National Standard. Instructional techniques. How people learn. Risk. Responsibility. The reasoning behind what we do.

And yes, use the apps.

Do mock tests. Practise hazard perception. Find the areas where you’re weak.

But don’t mistake practising questions for learning the subject.

There’s a difference.

If you repeatedly answer enough questions, eventually you’ll start remembering the answers.

That might help you pass Part One.

It doesn’t necessarily mean you understand them.

And that understanding matters because Part Two and Part Three are waiting.

So perhaps we need to change the conversation around Part One.

Not:

“Here’s the app. Let me know when you’ve passed.”

But:

“Let’s find out what you know, what you don’t know, and how you learn.”

There’s a little bit of the KEEP Principle in this for me too.

It starts with Knowledge — but not simply collecting enough knowledge to pass a test. What do you actually know? What do you understand? Where are the gaps?

Then comes Enable.

What does this particular PDI need in order to develop that knowledge?

A book? An app? A conversation? Some structure? Someone to explain something differently? Help with hazard perception rather than being left to repeatedly practise it and hope it eventually clicks?

That’s where the trainer comes in.

We’re not there simply to provide information. We should be helping someone find a way of learning that works for them.

And perhaps that’s a conversation for another day, because there’s rather more to KEEP than those first two stages.

But the point here is simple.

Part One isn’t the bit before ADI training begins.

Part One is ADI training.

And if you’re a trainer who isn’t involved until the PDI has passed it, perhaps you’re missing one of the best opportunities you’ll ever have to understand the person you’re about to train.

It’s not about studying harder.

It’s about studying smarter.

07/09/2026

Why now?

It’s a question I often ask someone when they start learning to drive.

Or, if they’ve learned before and are coming back to it after a break, why now?

I’m interested in the motivation behind the driving.

For a younger person the answer might be freedom. Their mates are driving. They want to be able to go places without relying on Mum and Dad.

As people get older, the answers often change. Work. Children. Family. Independence.

Today, someone gave me an answer that stopped me in my tracks a little.

Her husband isn’t well and she’s becoming increasingly reliant on family and friends to get around. She feels embarrassed having to ask.

That’s her why now.

She’s learned before. She has some skills. But confidence has always been the thing that has got in the way.

So my job at the moment isn’t really about teaching her to pass a driving test.

It’s about helping her believe.

In herself. In her ability. In the possibility that she can actually do this.

Piece by piece.

I can see what she’s capable of, but that isn’t particularly important. What matters is what she can see for herself.

I can present the challenges, but they have to be challenges she believes she can manage. Push too far and I simply prove her doubts right.

So we’ve even got a safe word.

Pineapple.

If it gets too much, she says pineapple. We stop. We take a break. We reset.

It sounds almost trivial, but it gives her something important.

Control.

And for now, I’m not sweating the small stuff either. There will be plenty of time to polish things later. Let’s recognise the meaningful gains first.

Towards the end of today’s lesson something interesting happened.

We found ourselves on a road.

Not a training route. A proper road, going somewhere.

There was no announcement. No “right, we’re going to progress you now.”

We just naturally ended up there because she was ready for it.

And she drove it.

That, for me, is progress.

The driving test will come. The required skills will come. The standard doesn’t change.

But the route we take to get there absolutely can.

And perhaps this is why I think “Why now?” is such an important question.

If we don’t understand why somebody is sitting next to us, it becomes very easy to follow the syllabus.

Our agenda.

Today we’re doing junctions. Next week we’re doing roundabouts. Then we’ll start manoeuvres.

But the syllabus only tells us what somebody needs to learn.

It doesn’t tell us who we’re teaching.

My role with this lady is to help her become someone who believes she can drive.

The pass happens as a consequence of all of that.

Piece by piece.

Interestingly, I’m not sure much of what I’ve described here would help me demonstrate a Grade A Standards Check.

And yet, to me, this is precisely what Grade A instruction looks like.

06/09/2026

The difference we seldom ask about

We talk a great deal within driver training about additional needs, neurodiversity and adapting lessons to suit the individual.

But how often do we consider colour blindness?

I am colour blind.

It doesn’t mean that I see the world in black and white. It means that some colours—and particularly certain shades—can be difficult to distinguish from one another.

Like most colour-blind people, I have developed ways of working things out. Position, context, brightness and familiarity all provide clues. Most of the time, other people would have no reason to know.

Approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some form of colour vision deficiency. That means almost every driving instructor will teach colour-blind pupils during their career—whether they realise it or not.

It can affect the instructor too.

Think about how often we use colour without giving it much thought:

“Follow the red car.”

“Look at the green line on this diagram.”

“The areas marked orange need more work.”

We might use different coloured pens, cones, diagrams, apps, progress charts or visual aids and assume that everybody sees the distinction as clearly as we do.

For me, red warning lights on a dashboard can sometimes be mistaken for orange. Indicators that appear after the brake lights have been operated can be missed because they seem to blend with the colour of the brake lights. Red text on a green background, or yellow text on a white background, can be extremely difficult—or even impossible—for me to see clearly.

A pupil may struggle to identify a particular vehicle, interpret a colour-coded resource or recognise the colour of a dashboard warning light. They may not say anything because they have adapted, feel embarrassed—or simply don’t know that they experience colour differently.

Traffic lights provide position and context as well as colour. Road signs use shapes, symbols and patterns. Dashboard warnings have symbols as well as coloured illumination. These additional clues matter.

The answer isn’t to stop using colour. It is to avoid making colour the only source of information.

Add words, symbols, shapes, patterns or positions. Rather than referring only to “the green line”, explain what the line represents. Instead of “follow the red car”, identify its make, size or position. Check that diagrams and resources remain understandable without relying entirely on colour.

And perhaps add a simple question to the conversation:

“Are there any colours or shades that you find difficult to tell apart?”

That may tell us far more than asking somebody whether they are colour blind.

Colour blindness doesn’t prevent somebody from learning to drive or becoming an effective instructor. I’m living proof of the latter. But awareness allows us to remove an unnecessary barrier—sometimes with an adjustment so small that nobody else would even notice.

Curious about your own colour vision? You can try the Specsavers online Ishihara test. https://www.specsavers.co.uk/eye-test/ishihara-colour-blind-test-online

An online test can provide an indication, but it cannot give a formal diagnosis. If you have concerns—or notice a change in your colour vision—speak to an optician.

More information is available from the NHS and Colour Blind Awareness. https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/

04/09/2026

A discussion last night got me thinking…

03/09/2026

During a lesson yesterday, an interesting situation developed.

The pupil is very competent in many aspects of driving and has done considerably more private practice than most. Her supportive uncle takes her out regularly but, nervous of teaching bad habits, has stayed away from reversing.

So yesterday was the day.

We started with a parallel park. Some might say that’s the hardest one to begin with, but that’s a different conversation!

Briefing done. Full talk-through agreed.

And then… meltdown.

Tears. Anger. Effing and blinding.

“I can’t do this.”

Too much information. Too much to think about. And, in that moment, responsibility for what was happening seemed to sit entirely with me.

Maybe some of it did.

But it got me thinking about something we perhaps don’t discuss enough.

What responsibility does the learner have when learning becomes difficult?

Once she’d settled, we talked and agreed on a completely different approach.

I’ll tell you later what we did and how it went.

But first…

What would YOU have done?