Maisie – Balerno Edinburgh
After having success teaching Maisie’s sister Charlotte to drive a few years ago it was now Maisie’s turn to start learning to drive. Maisie’s mum had got in touch early on in 2020 to ensure that I would have space to begin in October, as with the covid lockdown finding a driving instructor with availability was getting really difficult.
I managed to stay on track with things and having a batch of people pass early on in October ensuring I had the space to begin on her birthday. Having never driven before I drove us to a quiet housing estate in Edinburgh. Then proceeded to explain the basics, within an hour we were driving in and out of junctions and improving every minute.
We carried out weekly driving lessons and Maisie was lucky enough that she got to practice in between lessons with her mum. This had a noticeable effect on things as progress suddenly really picked up. The other thing that was really exciting was that Maisie’s dad had managed to find and book a theory test for her, these were extremely hard to find at the time with all the backlog from lockdowns.
After successfully sitting and passing her theory test nothing stopped us from booking her driving test, or that’s what we thought. We got one lined up for early January and then unfortunately the news that Scotland was going to need to go into a second lockdown meant that driving lessons and tests all had to be stopped until further notice. This was such a shame as Maisie was ready to give the driving test a shot.
After patiently waiting for things to reopen and driving lessons and tests to resume Maisie managed to get a driving test for the second week of everything starting up. This was great and all the practice that she had continued doing with her mum around Balerno had just helped consolidate things even more.
I was really confident that Maisie would do well in her driving test. She said as we arrived at the test centre that she was extremely nervous but I tried to assure her that that was completely normal and would be strange if she didn’t feel nervous. After waiting around 40 minutes Maisie returned and the examiner broke the good news that she had passed and had only picked up one driver fault! What a great result. This sets her up to now come and go from Balerno this summer when she likes.
