Five instructors, three cars, two cycles and a classroom
Teaching in Hulhumalé since 2016, from one car and a borrowed yard.
Why we book a person and not a slot
The school started with one car, which made the question easy. When the second car arrived the obvious thing was to take bookings for lessons and send whichever instructor was free, and we did that for about a year.
It wasted ten minutes of every hour. An instructor meeting somebody for the first time spends those ten minutes asking what has already been covered and getting an optimistic answer. Meanwhile the learner tells the story of their driving four different ways to four different people and nobody writes any of it down.
So now a lesson is an hour with a named person, booked on the form, and the record is written in the last two minutes and read before the next one. It means the form sometimes shows nothing at all for the instructor you want, which looks worse and is more honest.
The other rule is the middle of the day. Nothing is taught between twelve and four. The cars sit in the sun, the roads are at their worst and nobody has ever learned anything useful in that heat.
What we hold to
No package to a licence
Eight to twenty five hours is the honest range and it depends on you.
No promised pass
The test is on a day we are not there with an examiner we do not employ.
Nothing taught at midday
Early mornings and evenings only, for the cars and for the learner.
The instructors
Ibrahim Nazim
Nineteen years teaching, the first eleven of them in Addu. Started the school with one car in 2016 and still takes the seven o'clock lesson...
Aishath Rifa
Six years instructing and the reason half our car lessons are booked by women. Has the fullest diary in the school and it is booked about th...
Hussain Shakeeb
Runs most of the mock test drives, because he is the one who will hand somebody a sheet with eleven marks on it and then explain every one o...
Ali Zahir
Teaches cycles in the yard and then in Phase One before the traffic starts. Has put more first time riders on a road than anybody else here.