Driving lessons - instructor taking the rise?

We don't know if he's had 10 hours in total (5 sessions of 2 hours) or 10 x 2 hour lessons which is 20 hours.

If it's £28 for TWO hours I don't understand how the instructor can afford to do it!

Please come back PinkCakes and let us know how this is resolved!

I think it's quite obvious that £285 is for 10 HOURS of lessons, i.e. £28.50 per hour. No driving instructor would work for under £15 and hour.
It's strange reading all the responses about reversing around corners and 3 point turns etc. (all of which I had to do on my test). Things have moved on considerably. Part of the test is following a route on a sat nav, parallel parking, reversing into a designated space in a car park and gone are the 3 point turn and reversing around corners.

Well I assumed that but the OP says 10 lessons

I read somewhere that it was reckoned one driving lesson for every year of your life. So that could make 40 lessons. Depends on the learner. Your son could ask to move on and try new manoeuvres couldn't he?

I think it depends where you live as to how long your lessons need to be.
Back in 1963...!! when I learned to drive, I had to travel to King's Lynn which, although 20 miles away, that was where the nearest driving schools & the test centre was.
Therefore, I had to get to KL on the bus, or occasionally my Dad took me, then I had a 1 hour lesson at a time. (I had 20 hours at £1 each) (I was an apprentice earning £2:50 per week).

In 1989, & in 1997, when our own DC were learning, & very recently, when our DGD took her lesson & test, they were all picked up from home, it would have taken at least an hour to get to & from the city that they were to take their tests.
So they had plenty of on road general practice to & fro, plus an hour in the city, & thus needing 2 hours in total.

Sounds about right. Some people just take longer with the basics and a driving instructor worth his salt won’t try to rush someone who is not ready.

My DH is a driving instructor and the average time for a 40yr old to learn to drive is around 50 hours (plus private practice). Unfortunately, the older we get the longer it takes.

knspol

I don't think 2 hr lessons are always a good thing. I had several of these and it seemed only about half of the time was spent actually driving and the rest of the time listening to the instructor rabbit on and mostly not about driving. At the time I didn't have the confidence to complain.

My driving instructor used to start her pupils on 1 hour lessons and then require us to move to two hour blocks so that we could learn to concentrate for longer and drive further. We very rarely stopped driving during lessons unless she was prepping me for a new manoevre or I had done something really badly. The way she worked was that all rule of road/Highway code stuff had to be done outside of lessons and yes she would check I knew it while I was driving. I wasn't in anyway a natural driver and had a bad experience with the first instructor I had that put me off for years so I had that to overcome first. Passed second time of testing in my early 40's

I don't think the instructor is unreasonable; before doing manoeuvres s/he needs to feel confident that the learner is comfortable with the car and all aspects of hazard perception in a range of weathers, sunshine, glare, darkness, wind and town/country driving. Unless you can't stand the thought of driving in your car with a learner, I would try to find the money for the insurance and go out with him. We gave our children £500 each towards the cost of lessons/theory test/driving test (which was a stretch for us, particularly as we have five children). However, I also did a lot of driving practice with them in our car, and that definitely helped them with their confidence.

A friend of mine failed five times with a nationwide driving school. She then booked lessons with the man who taught my older two and passed after a few lessons. This was in the 80s.

She found that the first teachers would direct her on to large roundabouts then start firing directions at her. My children’s instructor would get her to park somewhere quiet then explain to her where she needed to position herself to get safely on and off the roundabout, sometimes sketching diagrams and checking she understood.