What Car Driving School

What Car are starting to roll out there driving school franchise although national advertising has not yey started.

What car driving School's "Early Bird Offer" is available till 15th Jan 2010.
Use your current vehicle and pay nothing till 15th Jan 2010. Use one of their (slightly less than prestigious) Hyundais for £99.99 per month untill Jan 2010.

As with all driving school franchises READ THE SMALL PRINT. There are set up costs and tie in periods with many driving school franchises. What Car Driving school phone number is 08456 21 21 00

BSM franchise - from £99 per week

The new look BSM have announced a new introductory offer franchises from £99 per week. Of course this doesn't last. The details of the advert are a little unclear, but they also offer £249 for the first ten weeks. BSM franchises can be contacted on 0800 740 8719

What Car? to launch driving school!

Two ex-BSM employees have teamed up with Haymarket publications to launch "What car? Driving School" Their ambitious plans include having 1,000 instructors by 2012 (approximately 2% of all registered instructors).
What marks them out from other established driving schools? Well it seems very little. Their franchise arrangements are pretty similar to many of the large franchise driving schools, with a lot of talk about raising standards of instruction etc.
Franchises will be about £55 per week if you provide your own car and recruit your own pupils and about £170 per week for car and brand franchise.
Instructors should note that their is a "setup cost" and if you want pupil referalls you need to pay a minimum of £19.50 per pupil.
These prices are not a lot different from the Red Driving School franchise.

It seems that the new driving school is relying essentially on the What Car? name to promote their brand. Wheteher they will be succesful remains to be seen!"

Red Driving School Franchise costs

Red driving school have published their franchise costs for adi's on their website. They are FROM £185 per week for a full franchise and FROM£85 per week for a headboard franchise.

Red Driving School Recruitment

Red driving school are now "proactively recruiting (can you recruit non-proactively?) for phase 2" of their ongoing expansion. (whatever pahse 2 is!). This would appear to be in the areas of sales, training and franchise management. Applications can be made by email to hr@lvg.co.uk

Disgruntled PDI's

If you have trained to become an Instructor and have failed the exams, been strung along by your trainer or failed to get enough work when you qualified, then Trevor MacDonald is waiting to hear from you! ITV are making a programme which will involve the subject of driving instructor training and are looking for people with real life experiences. E-mail Emily Burndred: emily.burndred@itv.com

Red Driving School accounts

According to a post on the UKDIC forum the parent company of Red Driving School makes 90% of it's income from training instructors and less than 6% from teaching learner drivers.

The figures suggest that over 5,000 instructor training courses were sold between April and October 2008. At that rate over the period of 4 years they will train 40,000 people. This is the equivalent to the total number of Instructors currently on the register!

The company accounts also suggest that the parent company has more sales staff than trainers.

NOTE: Do not rely on figures quoted in this post. Do your own research. Accounts can be obtained from Companies House.