How do you get a qualification in motorcycle coaching? Here’s my experience.

Working to gain a BTEC Part One

Soon after starting Survival Skills, I decided to look for some kind of recognised qualification as a post-test instructor. Although I was already a CBT and DAS qualified instructor and have a Masters degree in a science, something more relevant would look good on the CV, I thought. The best bet at the time looked to be a Driver Education course at Middlesex University, firstly partly because it had a distance learning option and I lived in Kent, and secondly because it could be extended through NVQ to degree, master and even PhD level.

After signing on and parting with the relevant amount of cash, my first modules arrived in the autumn. I knuckled down and got stuck into the work. With the deadline approaching two months later, I presented the work only to discover my tutor had taken a holiday just as we were supposed to be submitting the work. I was told it would now be marked too late to move onto the second module in the spring. I wasn’t particularly happy about that. I was even less happy when several of the topics I’d submitted were rejected because they were motorcycle-specific – I was told they didn’t have a tutor who knew anything about motorcycles. Hardly my problem, I thought. Eventually, I gathered a couple of points towards an NVQ, but as the experience hadn’t been brilliant I reluctantly decided to drop it and save my money.

Instead I turned to the BTEC in Advanced Motorcycle Instruction that was run by South Lincs Motorcycle Training. It turned out to be a far better choice than the Middlesex University course.

Both courses used an element of ‘accreditation of prior learning’ (APL) element for instructors with previous experience to replace traditional ‘taught’ courses. The idea is that you show the assessors that you have not only been teaching, but that you have used the courses you have taught as a learning experience for yourself to develop and improve both personal skills and the training being delivered. It avoids the need to spend weeks in the classroom being taught what you already know.

The required format for the BTEC was slightly different from the Middx course. This meant the original submission I had made to Middx was a useful background document, The main exhibit was to be a portfolio which still needed fleshing out with the hard evidence.

Sounds easy? Yes, at first sight. Easy enough to provide photocopies of my driving licence and CBT card. Not too difficult to provide copies of my current training notes. But to demonstrate learning?

Fortunately I’m one of those people who NEVER throws anything away. That does mean the office is knee-deep in paperwork and old bike magazines but it also meant I could lay hands on old notes which I used to develop the syllabus, briefing notes at various stages of development, course details themselves including debriefing notes and so on, right up to the current ‘in-use’ stuff.

First up I assembled notes from the original instructor training course I attended in 1995. I added the DAS training course I personally wrote back in early 1997 for the basic training school to help instructors pass the Direct Access assessment. I had a large pile of notes which became the drafts, redrafts, final versions and revised final versions of my advanced training syllabus itself. I had the same stacks of papers showing the various stages of development of the course handouts that go to the trainees. I added copies of other training materials such as training aids and assessment sheets. I added items of interest from from the website and motorcycle forums. I added original drafts and photocopies of items that appeared in the various magazines I have had articles published in. Finally, I added selected emails from trainees requesting courses and the follow up written debriefs that are provided with the courses.

The result? An overflowing A4 box-file on which I couldn’t actually shut the lid.

I made a date for an interview to determine whether the portfolio was up to the job and to see if I could justify the learning I was claiming. It wasn’t quite the grilling I had expected – Malcolm Palmer popped over to meet me in Oxford and spent a long evening chatting informally over several mugs of tea and a plate of fish and chips, whilst going piece-by-piece through the file. However, he was thorough – around 4 hours later (too late for a quick pint) Malcom left me with a list of what he would like included and copied for the formal submission for APL.

Now all I had to do was copy those I needed to submit, and annotate them to explain what they were and why I was submitting them. Job done, I thought.

Ha. What seemed like a couple of hours work dragged on into weeks of sifting the box, and hunting for the original files on the PC and long-lost zip disks (remember them?). Sometimes I discovered they were formatted for an extinct version of a word processor it seemed no-one else had ever used. In some cases I was able to reformat and print a copy, but where the notes were handwritten or the PC version was long gone, I had to scan then print page-by-page for the portfolio.

Eventually, everything was neatly placed in a large red ring binder and dropped off to Malcolm the evening before the second part of the APL assessment.

…. to be continued ….

When this piece was first written, the language of “cognitive load”, “human factors” and “decision fatigue” was not yet commonplace in rider training. Since then, research and experience have only strengthened the case made here: that learning on a motorcycle is limited not by ambition or mileage targets, but by the rider’s capacity to concentrate, absorb feedback and recover. High-mileage, endurance-style training made sense in an operational policing context; its uncritical transfer into civilian advanced training remains questionable. Traffic environments are now busier, bikes more capable, and distractions more numerous — making the question “how far is too far?” more relevant than ever. Mileage alone is a poor proxy for training value.

How far is too far?

There is undoubtedly a fine balance to draw between theory and practical time on the bike but good teaching demands both. Genuine riding exercises have a definite place but they require explanation. Simply piling on the miles is not good teaching technique, just as endless ‘chalk and talk’ offers limited opportunity to practice the theory.

Reading an industry mag some years back, the star letter writer – a training school owner – referred to a discussion with the owner of another school who, he claims, boasted of controlling his costs by: “padding out talks and never covering more than 50-60 miles during a full day’s training”. The letter writer, by contrast, claimed to offer “maximum on-road instruction” which reminded me of an ex-police instructor who claimed never to cover less than 200 miles in a day when out with his trainees.

So how far is too far?

There’s a simple answer to this. If the trainee is getting tired, then the session has gone too far.

Fatigue is dangerous. When we’re tired we make mistakes. Think back to your car lessons and remember how knackered you were after a two-hour session behind the wheel. Or remember how exhausting CBT and each day’s subsequent training was. As concentration slips, learning deteriorates and far worse, the risk of a riding error is magnified manyfold.

An experienced WORKING rider (such as a police rider, an instructor or a courier) may well be able to ride all day, but I worry when I hear of trainees doing eight-hour days and 200 mile rides. If the rider averages a reasonable 40 mph, that’s 5 hours riding time. 200 miles would have been a fair distance to ride in a day when I was despatching. These kind of distances will push typical commuting or recreational riders to (and possibly beyond) the limit.

And we still have to fit in the theory training, any off-road exercises and some breaks. Given the need for rest stops, I really wondered what the 200-miles-a-day instructor was actually managing to deliver in his eight hour day. It’s a lot more informative to ride short stretches for ten or fifteen minutes with interim debriefs whilst everything is still fresh in the trainee’s head, than hack fifty miles up the road between cafes. Well-designed theory sessions, as well as short off-road practice sessions, give the trainees a physical rest and a mental change of gear.

It’s also often overlooked by training schools that whilst the instructor is likely to be close to home, the trainee may well have had an early start and a long ride to get to the school. Even starting from an inn just ten minutes from the circuit, I had to set off at 7am for a race school to arrive in time to complete the formalities. By 1pm – six hours later – I’d spent two hours on track and another two hours in briefings and debriefings, and I was shattered. That’s why my own Survival Skills advanced rider training courses are pegged at five hours; beyond that fatigue sets in and learning drops off. And trainees have to get home again! I had 170 miles to ride back after that session. I left at 2pm and missed the afternoon session completely.

The perfect balance will vary from rider to rider since different trainees respond to different approaches. Too much talk is a turn-off for some, who want to get on the bike and ride, but others actually want to talk – they may want to discuss particular issues at length or be willing and able to learn from in-depth question and answer sessions. It’s up to the instructor to vary the lesson to suit each client, and not to make a teacher-centric decision about how the course should proceed.

The least charitable view would be that trainers running high mileage courses are actually padding out the lack of theory by simply keeping the trainee sitting on the bike all day! After all, spending a few ££s on another five litres of unleaded is much easier than actually writing a decent syllabus and putting together a lesson plan for the day. But mostly I get the feeling it’s simply lack of imagination and a case of “that’s the way it’s always been done” and yet another hangover from police training.

02. Must, Should, Could know – the hierarchy of learning

I often hear riders saying to the less-experienced:

“Just go riding. Do some miles and you’ll get better.”

It sounds good in theory, but in reality there’s a huge problem – what if we don’t really know WHAT we need to be better at? What if we don’t know HOW to improve? And even more importantly in some way, WHY should we be aiming to improve and how do we know we NEED to improve?

How is simply piling on miles going to us improve our riding?

Simply going riding won’t automatically improve skills, particularly if we’re ‘practicing’ the wrong stuff. Experienced riders often forget their own learning experience was sometimes painful for that very reason.

So here are some thoughts of mine that will help you see where to focus your efforts going forward, and to better understand the content of these riding tips.

Let’s start with what we know. ‘Must Know, Should Know, Nice to Know’. There are various versions of this ‘triple tier of knowledge’ around. My former instructor buddy Malcolm Palmer used ‘Must Know, Need to Know, Nice to Know’ to define the necessary levels of our biking knowledge.

These are roughly aligned with ‘novice’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘advanced’ riding standards.

‘Must Know’ encompasses the absolute basics every motorcyclist needs to grasp before even turning the key. These are the non‐negotiable skills, concepts and knowledge that form the bedrock of riding, and they are what we learn at beginner level. Examples include an understanding of the function and the need for a correct fit of a safety helmet, knowing the rules on licences and insurance, being aware of the rules of the road (the basics are in the Highway Code here in the UK) and how to apply them, being capable of using the clutch to move off and change gear, and knowing what to do when we get to a ‘Give Way’ junction.  

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Here’s how do assess yourself – download these tools I’ve made available and use them help you figure out where you sit within those parameters. They’re FREE!

‘Advanced Riding in 500 Words’ an ultra-concise guide to the fundamentals of riding DOWNLOAD HERE https://ko-fi.com/s/ca80cf2083

‘Survival Skills Self-Assessment Pie Chart’ easy to use visual aid to measure how solid your riding is DOWNLOAD HERE https://ko-fi.com/s/e7eeb0421e

‘Guide to Self-Assessment’ explains the benefits of assessing ourselves, and how to do it DOWNLOAD HERE https://ko-fi.com/s/6c91d119f3

Working out what ‘we know’ allows us to define just what it is that we ‘don’t know’ and arguably this is actually more important because it’s much more difficult to become aware of knowledge and skills gaps, at least not until something goes wrong and we realise we weren’t prepared.

This is where the downloads will help you. The ‘Advanced Riding in 500 words’ guide defines what advanced riding is, then the other two help you work out just where you personally sit on the scale of personal development.

As experienced riders, going ‘back to basics’ may sound unnecessary, but it can remind us of sound practices that may have slipped to the backs of our minds over time, and nudge us to do something to correct any bad habits we’ve slipped into.

As developing riders, we might re-discover something that slipped through during our training, something we might have forgotten in the flurry of learning

And at any stage of development, returning to PRACTICE the basics not only reinforces what we learned by using repetition to turn good riding practices into habits – practice makes permanent.

Just print the form off, have a good think about your riding and mark your riding from inside to out for each category. If you’re honest, and don’t overrate your abilities, then the chart will help you identify weak areas where you need to work.

So, what if you do find a weak area?

Have a think about how you’re going to fix it. Read around the topic, watch videos, ask questions. Think about getting some professional help – I’m happy to answer questions about riding without obligation by email, and if you need a more in-depth response, I offer one-hour online coaching sessions which can be run for anyone, anywhere in the world.

If you need on-road coaching, and you have a specific issue, then I’d always recommend a personal riding coach because they will work to to identify YOUR weaknesses and offer a PERSONALISED programme to fix them. Groups like the IAM have a different role – to get you up to their standard of riding so you can pass their test. RoSPA is a bit more personalised but the benchmark your riding is measure against still their own test standard.

Survival Skills offers personalised on-road training and on-line coaching . And don’t forget my re-launched e-course too. They all aim to interact with you as an individual.

Start riding with Survival Skills Riding Tips today and turn every mile into an opportunity for growth and safety. Absolutely free.

As I write this short note, the UK government is holding consultations on reforming rider training. Whether anything will happen, who knows? If it does, I’ll update this particular article.

Rider Competence: Who’s Truly Ready for the Road?

Back in 1995, I was just starting out on my journey to become a qualified rider coach by starting at the bottom – as a CBT instructor. Along with three other novice instructors, I took a very intensive and thorough training course with CSM – at that time the biggest rider training school in the country. The course was very hard work, and as I was to discover over the next couple of years, an excellent foundation for working with riders at all levels – I learned more about teaching in six days than I had in six months on a post-grad education course.

But at the end I still didn’t have an answer to a crucial question:

“How do you know if a trainee rider is at an adequate standard to issue a CBT certificate?”

Rider Competence and CBT

So I asked our trainer. Here was his answer:

“Is he or she likely to kill themselves as soon as they ride out of the training school gate? If yes, then they’re not at the CBT standard. If no, then give them the certificate.”

That was pretty brutal but it answered the question. If the rider could cope out on the road, being aware of the most likely hazards and having the necessary skills to change speed and direction to negotiate those threats, then that was good enough. Scary, really. It certainly doesn’t demonstrate rider competence.

And that brings me to a question that anyone involved in coaching riders, whether directly via a training course, or even when writing articles online:

“Rider competence – what is it, what level should it be set at, and who qualifies as competent?”

Rider Competence – who qualifies?

Here’s my answer.

Competency is about being to move beyond rigid context-free rules. My favourite example of a rigid routine that is often followed without thinking about WHY we’re applying it is the basic routine taught to all new drivers (*) in the UK:

‘Mirror – Signal – Manoeuvre’.

Condensed to MSM to help us remember, it’s all too often followed by “oops!”

It’s taught to new riders too – just substitute ‘Observation’ for Mirror and you have the OSM routine.

Using mirrors and indicators competently requires us to understand the limitations of mirrors and why a blind spot check may be needed, how our signals will be interpreted by other road uses and why it’s still necessary to double-check all the way through the manoeuvre to ensure that it’s still going the way we planned it.

This is one measure of competence – being able to assign importance to particular activities and events, and thus being able to prioritise our responses to situations by analysing what matters most, rather than following a routine we learned by rote.

CBT routes are carefully chosen to take the new riders around a range of hazards, but at the end of the two hour road ride, the trainees have only learned ‘by rote’ routines for a very limited number of traffic situations. And of course, the instructor is there all the time at the end of the radio link, ready to stop in with help and advice at any moment.

Learning by rote doesn’t allow for thinking application, and learner riders straight out of CBT may not even remember the OSM routine at the end of the long day. So, if you ask me, a rider straight out of CBT definitely isn’t about to demonstrate rider competence – far from it. CBT really doesn’t equip a new rider to cope with the roads. It offers the barest selection of survival tools. And that’s why the DVSA always intended CBT to be the lead-in to training for the full motorcycle test.

But what about riders who’ve passed that full bike test?

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Rider Competence and the DVSA bike test

One thing I’ve heard many times is that trainees carry their trainer’s voice in their heads, sometimes for years after taking the UK motorcycle test, but out their on the road in front of the examiner, there’s a crucial difference when compared with CBT.

Candidates have to make their own decisions.

They don’t have the comfort zone of their instructor and the radio link to keep them out of trouble, though the examiner will step in when there’s clear danger, though of course that’s an instant test fail.

And since on test a candidate can end up anywhere, those riders cannot apply fixed rules – they have to be able to use their knowledge to solve problems. They may need to negotiate an unfamiliar roundabout or junction by using reason and analogy, thus applying what they already know to a novel situation.

This ability to move beyond rules and and rote learning, and to apply what’s already known flexibly to new challenges is the first of our measures of competence.

This is exactly why practice must be structured — something I explore in my piece on the Salami Principle and why practice makes permanent.

So by this measure, I’d say that a rider who passes the bike test – or at least, passes it without racking up a dozen minor faults – qualifies as competent. Since riders who manage a test pass must have managed to ride the test route without putting themselves at risk, I’d say most riders with a full licence are by these measures competent. Not necessarily ‘proficient’,  note, and definitely not ‘expert’. But most are competent enough to deal with the the majority of the challenges they will encounter on the roads in the next year or two…

…with one major proviso. The DVSA test creates rider competence within the context of the riding environment they are tested in. And given the limitation of the the basic DVSA motorcycle test, that’s urban riding with a bit of country road and dual carriageway thrown in. The test simply isn’t in-depth enough to cover much ground physically – the candidate is on the bike for not much more than half-an-hour. Thirty minutes doesn’t allow for much riding outside town centres so basic training rarely covers cornering or single carriageway overtaking, for the simple reason neither are likely to be severely tested on the DVSA test.

In reality, both of which are actually pretty essential skills. Nor do most learners get to tackle heavy city-centre congestion or mountain roads. And none ever ride on motorways. So by these measures, whilst a newly-qualified rider should be capable of coping with standard town traffic, they would not likely be competent in all areas.

I’ve written elsewhere about how cognitive load and fatigue limit learning — see my article on how far is too far for a training day.

What about riders who’ve taken post-test training, maybe gaining an advanced riding qualification along the way?

Rider Competence and post-test training

Well, even with their gong, some riders continue to dodge big cities. Others still avoid motorways. Many actively stay away from narrow country roads. Many a time I’ve been told “I don’t enjoy riding in those conditions so I avoid them”. We may not enjoy all riding environments, but when there are places we actively avoid, then we can’t claim to be fully competent either, regardless of having demonstrated an ‘advanced’ level of riding skills on test.

There’s also a mental element to rider competence which I believe is very much ignored at both basic and post-test level, And that’s the acceptance of responsibility for our choices.

And that starts with understand that we actually MADE choices and that we weren’t forced into a course of action by unavoidable circumstances. A driver didn’t pull out on us “from nowhere” – the car came from somewhere. The bend didn’t “tighten up on us” – we didn’t read it correctly. Most dangerously of all, if an overtake goes wrong, it wasn’t “the driver’s fault for not checking his mirrors”, it was our responsibility not to put ourselves into the position where we could end up in difficulties. In short, if we’re still blaming other road users when we end up in a potentially-dangerous situation, then we’re not demonstrating competence either.

So here’s what I do when I’m training; I apply a cascade of questions:

1. did we arrive in one piece at the end of the journey? If we didn’t then we’re obviously not competent. If we did, we can move to the next question…

2. did we force other road users to change speed or direction to avoid us? If we did, then it’s the actions of others keeping us safe on the road, not our own riding behaviour – we’re still not competent.

3. did we scare ourselves and have to take serious evasive action along the way? If we did, then clearly there was an element of luck involved in keeping us out of trouble, and we’re not competent yet. If we got there with no frights, then the next question…

4. did we arrive by gliding around other road users without impacting their choices, did we arrive without any sudden scares or evasive manoeuvres on our part? If we did, then it’s likely we are competent enough.

If you want to check your own riding for competence, you can try answering  these questions based on your own riding. But naturally, those answers lead to another series of questions. What are the skills and knowledge that are absolutely NECESSARY for a rider to know and to be able to perform to reach competency? What SHOULD a rider know? And what’s just NICE – the superficial gloss which looks good but doesn’t actually add any particular value to our riding? Next time, I’ll try to answer that.

Final point. We are unlikely to be competent at every area of riding. But the more areas we can tick off, the safer we’re likely to be out on the roads.