What is the examiner actually doing from the back seat on your Part 3? Diana sits down with Wayne Pinnington, who spent more than 20 years with DSA and DVSA as a car examiner, an ADI examiner, and then a test centre manager and LDTM, at one point running seven test centres and 22 staff between Wrexham and Buxton. He qualified as an ADI himself in 1999, and he is now back in the ADI world as a training consultant.

The first thing Wayne clears up will surprise a lot of PDIs. The chat you have with the examiner before the lesson carries no weight in the marking. It gives the examiner a picture of what the lesson should look like, and the more detail you give, the less they need to probe. After that, only the evidence in the car counts, and the whole lesson is assessed together back in the test centre. He is just as clear on another point: everyone starts a Part 3 on a pass, and every examiner wants to give one.

From there they get into how the marking really works. The examiner is looking at what the highest risk is, and whether you have seen it and are doing something about it. Deal with the high risk and you are heading for a pass. How far you go with the lower risk issues is often the difference between a B and an A. And when an examiner marks a competency as a 3, it means they could not give you a single piece of advice to improve it.

They also cover whether manoeuvres are allowed on a Part 3 (they are, if it is a real lesson and not a quick recap), why beginner lessons disappeared after Covid, how obvious a staged lesson looks from the back, and why PDIs are so often 10 to 15 seconds too late with their instruction. Diana shares what she has seen when pupils are used to having a trainer in the back, and Wayne gives his one piece of advice for the night before your test.

What we cover:

- Why the pre lesson chat with the examiner is not marked, and why it still matters

- How the examiner builds a holistic picture and decides the result

- Risk based marking, and what separates a Grade B from a Grade A

- What a score of 3 really means

- Manoeuvres, beginner lessons and what counts as a realistic Part 3 lesson

- Staged lessons, over instruction and being proactive

- How the Part 3 differs from a standards check

Key takeaways:

- Give the examiner plenty of detail before the lesson: hours with you, private practice, driving history. It saves them probing, but the marking only starts when the wheels turn.

- Find the highest risk your pupil is showing right now and work on that first. Everything else comes after.

- Being proactive means planning around the pupil's needs before you set off. It does not mean talking more.

- Get your pupils used to someone sitting in the back long before test day, so the examiner in the mirror is nothing new.

- When a pupil makes one mistake, ask why before you fix it. Do not reteach something they have done well for the last 20 minutes.

- The night before: teach the pupil next to you what they need, keep them safe, and keep it simple.

Mentioned in this episode:

- Wayne Pinnington Driver Training Consultancy on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61590239812561

- Email Wayne: waynepinningtonitc@gmail.com

- Wayne works across Merseyside and Cheshire and offers online consultations for everywhere else.

Want to train with Inspire? www.inspireinstructortraining.co.uk

Diana opens this one with a confession. When she was qualifying she had done the reading, sat through the Zooms, learned the theory, and genuinely expected to be the bee's knees the moment she started teaching. She wasn't. Not because the theory was wrong, but because she had never actually done the job. The knowing and the doing turned out to be two completely different things, and finding that out knocked her belief in herself sideways.

That gap is what this episode is about. Visualisation, positive thinking, backing yourself, they are all real skills and Diana is not dismissing any of them. But belief needs evidence, and the only thing that produces evidence is action. You can believe you will be the best instructor on the planet and it will stay a belief forever if you never change what you do in the car on Monday.

The clearest example is the one nearly every PDI recognises. Someone sits in the back and the lesson stops going like a normal lesson. You hear yourself say it afterwards: I wouldn't normally do that. And yet the exam you have to pass is somebody sitting in the back watching you teach. So the action is obvious and uncomfortable in equal measure. Get people in the back, regularly. Your trainer, another PDI, an ADI, the learner's mum. Two of those four are free. If that feels too big a step today, record yourself instead, dash cam or a phone in a holder facing backwards so you are not watching your own face.

Diana then works the same logic through levels of instruction and through digging deeper, and finishes by turning it back on learner drivers, because a pupil saying "I just need to be more confident at roundabouts" is making exactly the same mistake we are.

What we cover:

- Why belief without action is treading water, and why the brain needs evidence before it will believe anything

- The knowing and doing gap, and the tell Diana spots in PDIs who have the theory but not the reps

- Getting people in the back of the car, and the free ways to do it

- Recording yourself, dash cam versus phone, and which is less intrusive

- Bringing levels of instruction to conscious competence, with the "I can go after that blue car, can't I?" example

- Building a bank of questions when digging deeper is the skill that keeps letting you down

- Why "I just need more practice" is a sweeping statement that helps nobody, pupil or instructor

- Borrowing belief from the process when your own belief is low

Key takeaways:

- Isolate one skill. Not three. One, for the next fortnight.

- Book somebody into the back of a lesson this week, even if it is a family member.

- If that is too much today, record one lesson and watch it back.

- When you inadvertently step in, note it. Then ask afterwards whether it was actually needed.

- Replace "I need more confidence" with "what specifically would give me that confidence?", for yourself and for your pupils.

- Ask yourself Diana's closing question: what is the one action you are taking this week, and how will you know if it worked?

Want to train with Inspire? www.inspireinstructortraining.co.uk

Emma Fonnaland posted a list called "controversial things I do as a driving instructor". It did over 300,000 views and the comments filled with instructors telling her she was wrong. Phil read it, found he disagreed with almost none of it, and got her on the podcast to work through the list one item at a time.

What comes out is not really a list of quirks. It is one idea applied ten different ways: do not steer your pupils around the hard thing, take them into it while you are still sat next to them. Snow. Motorways. The drive home after the test. A toddler yapping in the back seat. Emma's own line is the one worth keeping: you learn from experiences, not explanations.

Some of it will land straight away. Some of it will annoy you. Phil went in disagreeing about mock tests and came out having changed his mind on letting learners drive home after the test, which is worth the listen on its own.

What we cover:

- Why Emma has never taught a test route, and what she does instead at the junctions that genuinely catch people out

- The case against mock tests, and Phil's counter-argument for running them as a pressure rehearsal rather than a driving assessment

- Taking every learner on the motorway before they pass, and why this should not be controversial at all

- Ditching reference points completely, and what happens when a borrowed reference stops working in a different car

- Why a firm lesson plan can make you a worse instructor, and the difference between a plan and a direction

- Letting learners drive home after the test, and the reasoning that flips every objection on its head

- Not publishing a pass rate, and the type of enquiry that stops arriving once you stop

- Eye mirrors, lessons in the snow, and pupils bringing their kids along

Key takeaways:

- A plan is a direction, not a route. If you cannot abandon it at the first junction, it is doing your pupil a disservice. Worth hearing twice if you are working towards Part Three.

- Teach the principle, not the place. Knowing your local roundabout is useful. Being unable to drive an unfamiliar one is a fail waiting to happen.

- A reference point you handed them is yours, not theirs. If they build their own, make sure it can flex.

- Ask what your pass rate is actually recruiting. Publish it and you attract people who want you to get them through. Stop publishing it and you attract people who want to learn to drive.

- Pick one thing you currently avoid because it is hard, and put it into a lesson this week.

Mentioned in this episode:

- Emma Fonnaland, Wheelwise Driving School. Wheelwise Emma on TikTok and Instagram, Wheelwise Driving School on Facebook.

- Oli Taylor, on hazard management: be a spectator, not a participant.

Want to train with Inspire? www.inspireinstructortraining.co.uk