🟡 Building a Better Driving School · 9 min read
Spend enough time talking to driving instructors and sooner or later you’ll hear a conversation about today’s young learners.
They’re more anxious.
They need more reassurance.
They don’t respond well to criticism.
They’re less resilient.
They struggle to organise themselves.
Occasionally, somebody will reach for the word snowflake.
I’ve never found that particularly helpful.
Not because I don’t recognise some of the behaviours being described. I do.
I’ve taught learners who need considerable reassurance. I’ve met young people who find criticism difficult. Some struggle with anxiety, organisation or dealing with something going wrong.
But I’ve also taught plenty who don’t.
And increasingly I’ve found myself asking a different question.
Rather than:
What’s wrong with this generation?
Perhaps we should ask:
What happened while this generation was growing up?
Because they didn’t grow up in the world we did.
Two different worlds are sitting in the car
I’m 63.
A 17 or 18-year-old sitting beside me today has grown up in a world almost unimaginably different from the one that shaped me.
That doesn’t make my world better.
It doesn’t make theirs worse.
But it does make them different.
And perhaps we sometimes underestimate just how different.
I recently attended an online presentation by a child psychologist. There wasn’t one particular fact that changed my thinking.
It was the accumulation of everything being discussed.
Parenting.
Technology.
Social media.
Mental health.
Education.
COVID.
Independence.
The pressures young people experience.
It made me realise that when an older instructor and a young learner sit beside each other in a car, we’re not simply looking at an age difference.
There are two very different formative worlds sitting in that car.
Understanding that might help us become better teachers.
Their childhood happened online as well as offline
For my generation, childhood was overwhelmingly physical.
Friends were people you went out to see.
If somebody said something embarrassing about you at school, hopefully it stayed at school.
When you went home, much of that world stayed behind.
Today’s young people have experienced something very different.
Ofcom’s research shows just how embedded online life has become in childhood. Its latest work reports that screen use now begins remarkably early, while earlier research found that 96% of children aged 3–17 watched content on video-sharing services.
For many young people, the distinction between an “online life” and a “real life” probably doesn’t make much sense.
It’s all real life.
That brings enormous advantages.
Information.
Connection.
Communities.
Entertainment.
Learning.
But it also creates something previous generations experienced very differently: almost continuous visibility and comparison.
When I made a mistake at 17, there wasn’t potentially an audience in my pocket.
That’s worth remembering when we encounter a learner who seems particularly worried about getting something wrong.
It doesn’t prove social media caused their anxiety.
Human beings are considerably more complicated than that.
But their relationship with mistakes, judgement and comparison has developed in a very different environment from mine.
Then COVID arrived
There’s another part of this particular generation’s story we simply cannot ignore.
Think about how old today’s learners were in 2020.
A learner who is 18 today was around 12.
Someone who is 22 was around 16.
At exactly the age when young people would normally have been developing socially, becoming more independent, sitting examinations, forming relationships and experiencing more of the world without their parents, normal life suddenly stopped.
The evidence about the consequences is complicated, and we shouldn’t exaggerate it. Government reviews found that many children coped well, while others experienced significant difficulties. Researchers have also cautioned against assuming that every change in young people’s mental health was caused by the pandemic.
But disruption undoubtedly happened.
Education changed.
Social contact changed.
Routines disappeared.
Important milestones were missed.
The government’s recent Youth Matters: State of the Nation describes today’s young people as growing up in a world shaped by the pandemic alongside the cost-of-living crisis, an always-connected digital environment and wider global uncertainty.
We can’t know exactly what that combination did to the individual learner sitting beside us.
But pretending it did nothing seems equally unreasonable.
What about parenting?
This is another area where it’s very easy to become judgemental.
We sometimes hear that today’s parents do too much for their children.
Perhaps some do.
But parenting has always reflected the society surrounding it.
Attitudes towards risk have changed.
Communication has changed.
Technology means parents and children can remain connected almost continuously.
Expectations around safety have changed.
And the circumstances in which young adults become independent have changed too.
Recent UCL research following almost 10,000 people born in the UK between 2000 and 2002 found that 68% were still living with their parents at 23. Financial circumstances were a significant part of the explanation.
It’s very easy to look at somebody still relying on their parents at 22 and compare them with what we were doing at the same age.
It’s harder — but much more useful — to ask whether we’re actually comparing like with like.
We have changed too
This is perhaps the bit we forget.
Generational differences work both ways.
I was shaped by my upbringing just as much as today’s 18-year-old has been shaped by theirs.
Perhaps criticism was delivered differently.
Perhaps adults weren’t particularly interested in how something made us feel.
Perhaps we were expected to sort more things out ourselves.
Perhaps we had freedoms at 12 or 13 that would seem extraordinary to some parents today.
Some of that may have helped us.
Some probably didn’t.
But here’s the dangerous bit.
We remember our childhood through the eyes of the adults we’ve subsequently become.
When an instructor says:
“We weren’t like this at their age.”
I sometimes wonder.
Were we really not?
Or have we forgotten?
I suspect every generation eventually looks at the one following it and wonders what’s happened to young people.
Perhaps that’s one tradition every generation manages to preserve remarkably well.
Understanding isn’t the same as excusing
This distinction matters enormously.
Understanding why somebody might struggle with something doesn’t mean removing the challenge.
If a learner finds feedback difficult, we still need to give feedback.
If somebody lacks confidence making independent decisions, they still need to learn to make them.
If they struggle when something goes wrong, driving will inevitably require them to develop greater resilience.
And if they’re anxious about driving independently, eventually they will have to drive without us sitting beside them.
The required outcome hasn’t changed.
A safe driver still needs judgement.
Responsibility.
Independence.
An ability to manage risk.
An ability to recover when something doesn’t go to plan.
Understanding the learner isn’t about lowering any of those standards.
It’s about improving our chances of helping them reach them.
The destination doesn’t change. How we help someone reach it might.
The behaviour is information
This is where I think the professional challenge becomes interesting.
Imagine a learner reacts badly to feedback.
We could decide:
“They’re too sensitive.”
That gives us a judgement.
But it doesn’t give us much to work with.
Alternatively, we could become curious.
Why did that feedback land badly?
Was it the wording?
The timing?
Were they already frustrated with themselves?
Did they interpret constructive feedback as personal criticism?
Would asking them to evaluate the situation first produce a different conversation?
The standard hasn’t changed.
We’re still addressing exactly the same driving issue.
But instead of simply labelling the behaviour, we’re using it as information.
That’s much closer to how I want to teach.
Perhaps they talk about things we didn’t
There’s another possibility worth considering.
Are today’s young people genuinely experiencing vastly more anxiety?
Or are they sometimes simply more willing and able to describe it?
Mental health has a vocabulary today that many older generations simply didn’t grow up with.
That doesn’t mean every use of that language is necessarily helpful.
But neither should we mistake greater willingness to talk about something for evidence that previous generations never experienced it.
Perhaps some of us were anxious too.
We just called it something else.
Or said nothing.
Again, the sensible position is probably curiosity rather than certainty.
They’re becoming adults in a different economy too
Learning to drive doesn’t happen in isolation from the rest of someone’s life.
Today’s young adults are navigating expensive housing, changing employment patterns and a cost-of-living environment that can delay some of the traditional markers of independence.
That UCL study of 23-year-olds is particularly interesting because it complicates the idea that young people simply don’t want independence. Many remained at home because moving out was financially difficult or because they were saving towards doing so.
Perhaps what sometimes looks like delayed independence is partly the consequence of independence becoming harder to afford.
Context matters.
None of this describes every young person
This might be the most important section of the article.
There isn’t really a typical 18-year-old.
I’ve taught confident young people.
Quiet ones.
Resilient ones.
Anxious ones.
Highly organised learners.
Learners whose parents organise almost everything.
People who want constant conversation.
People who need time to think.
Neurodivergent learners.
Young people dealing with circumstances I know very little about.
A generation is useful when we’re trying to understand broad social change.
It’s much less useful when somebody gets into the passenger seat.
At that point I’m not teaching a generation.
I’m teaching a person.
Perhaps curiosity is part of the job
I don’t expect driving instructors to become psychologists.
I’m certainly not one.
But I do think professional teaching requires curiosity about the person we’re trying to help.
If somebody responds differently from the way we think we would have responded at their age, perhaps the answer isn’t immediately to toughen them up.
Nor is it to remove every difficulty from their path.
Perhaps it’s simply to understand them a little better.
What do they need from me right now?
When should I support?
When should I challenge?
When should I ask another question?
When should I let them struggle for a moment and discover that they can solve the problem themselves?
Those judgements have always been part of good teaching.
Perhaps understanding generational context simply gives us another piece of information with which to make them.
They didn’t grow up in the world we did
Today’s young learners didn’t choose smartphones, social media, COVID, the education system, the housing market or the parenting culture into which they were born.
Those things formed part of their world.
Just as a completely different collection of influences formed part of ours.
We don’t have to approve of every consequence.
We don’t have to lower our standards.
And we certainly shouldn’t assume every difficulty a young person experiences can be explained by their generation.
But perhaps we could resist the easy label.
Because labels tend to end conversations.
Curiosity starts them.
The young person sitting beside us still needs to become a safe, responsible and independent driver.
That hasn’t changed.
But if the world that shaped them has changed, perhaps good teaching begins with trying to understand that world rather than wishing they’d grown up in ours.
There aren’t two generations sitting in the car.
There are two different worlds that produced them.
And somewhere between those two worlds, we have to find a way to learn together.
Wayne Smith
Founder, WS Driving Collective
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