David Allen from Birmingham Approved Driving Instructors Association (BADIs)

Birmingham Approved Driving Instructors is one of the highest regarded driving instructor associations in the United Kingdom. David Allen talks to us about their origins, their best practices and what separates them from the rest - by focussing on positivity and improving each and every one of their members.

So, David thanks very much for joining me today. It's great to have you on and what I want to do is talk a bit about Birmingham Approved Driving Instructors, a bit about you and where do you see the industry going.

Why don't you get started by telling us a bit about yourself and how you came into this position?

You're welcome Michael. My name's David obviously my second name's Allen as well I’m not related to the the Irish comedian in any shape or form.

I’ve been an ADI for about oh how many years now oh it's gonna be 19 years. I qualified with British School of Motoring at the time okay uh did one of their part-time franchises. Then I moved on to start local school and actually started working for myself. I also got into fleet training, fleet driver training working for different training providers. I’ve run also my own driving school eighth grade driving school as well okay I run that as well and also I do classroom based courses as well i do um you know the speed awareness courses. I also drive CPD sessions as well.

I’ve recently just started to teach drink driving rehabilitation training which is very rewarding.

Perfect, thank you for that. Moving on to the associations how can you give us a background on Birmingham Approved Driving Instructors and how long have you been a part of it?

Yeah right okay so I did do my research a little bit earlier on to make sure I got all my facts right now um baddies was formed by a gentleman called well people actually was it was something called David Wilkinson and the lady called Lisa Hatwell at the time.

They had an initial meeting, they had a speaker from the DVSA, and they decided to form Birmingham Approved Driving Instructors (BADIs).

It was formed is because we wanted to have positive thinking ADIs that actually wanted to better themselves. That's what that was all about to actually just get a lot of group ADIs that wanted to better themselves not just moaning in the test centre and all that baloney and this all the negativity about the DVSA.

There's none of that it was just how can we actually improve ourselves and it's a bit of a weird name Birmingham Approved Driving Instructors - BADIs. But we are nothing like the buddies but we're actually the goodies.

I just love them in BADIs - you win my favourite association name. So, what sort of events do you guys host?

Okay what we hold now at the moment is we own predominantly zoom meetings we have since the first lockdown in in March we had weekly Zoom meetings and that was either hosted by a guest speaker from different areas of the industry like Diane Hall for instance. We have Tracy Fields from Confident Drivers coming soon. So for us it’s about helping our ADIs and improving and continuing to push ourselves.