Teaching programme is the real product that you buy from the driving school, so pay proper attention to your research. Its core is formed by teaching material, which is a set of theoretical and practical information. It includes narration, presentations, graphic pictures, photographs, videos, animations and technologies (simulators).

How to evaluate teaching programme and material?

Your main task is to study what information is available by the following criteria:

1)    Team

Is it known who created the teaching programme? Who is responsible for its implementation?

2)    Programme

Is this a unified driving school programme or training provided by individual specialists? Is the teaching programme unified for theoretical and practical parts? Is the teaching programme authentic with teaching materials specially created for it or is it a so-called pseudo programme where the training facilities are actually stolen and infringing copyright? Do you, after all, want to entrust your training to such people?

3)    Result

Short-term result: fast and successfully passed examination. See if the school offers information on how long it takes on average to get the desired category, and what the examination statistics are!

Long-term result: acquired habits and long-term knowledge, or the bottom line of training: few penalty points, number of traffic accidents, economical driving skills, etc. Do they talk about school even after completing the courses? Do they return to it? How is it evaluated among professional drivers?

Ask your driving school and you will be surprised by the received answers. Before choosing a driving school, look by a description or video introducing you to what to expect.

Industry problems

If you do not study at Presto driving school, it is a mistake to assume that the training will be carried out according to the driving school programme. In fact, a driving school is only the organiser of the training process, in which the attracted licensed teachers and instructors teach customers according to their individual programme, working not as employees, but as independent private entrepreneurs, often simultaneously cooperating with several driving schools.

Consequently, the customer’s results will most directly depend on the success – the abilities of the teacher chosen by the driving school for the training group and the instructor selected by you.

Unfortunately, even the greatest charisma cannot fill the holes caused by the lack of teaching materials – for this reason, precious lesson time is wasted on discussing the matters not related to the topic. Teaching materials of other authors have to be given as own materials, thereby violating copyright.

The industry is new, and in it theoretical and practical teaching material has never been systematised, the quality of materials, the synchronisation of theory with practice, or pedagogical methods for better teaching have not been evaluated.

For this reason, after the video training, you will again be faced with another theoretical face-to-face programme, the master where will be just another teacher. Simultaneously, the driving school implements several independent programmes, the content of which is not mutually agreed. The situation usually arises where each instructor has different driving rules.

In addition, from June 2021, all driving schools in Latvia will allow a type of distance learning – video training. Consequently, as of January 2024, up to 10% fewer students pass the RTSD examination from the first. The disparity in statistics is also growing among large schools.

In June 2024, the RTSD examination test will be removed from the website and it is expected that the difference in results will be very noticeable in future. The 20-year practice of relying on examination questions and pictures you’ve already seen will no longer work.

What does Presto offer?

Presto driving school is no longer an ordinary driving school, but has become a publisher of road traffic content, collecting it from all over the world and systematically producing its own. This scale and experience, especially communication with content publishers and experts from other countries, has helped create new, high-quality teaching materials.

1)    Team of specialists

Only a specialist of such level who knows all categories, industry problems, legislation and sees the interrelationship is able to create new programmes and develop a new system.

Therefore, only at Presto, perhaps the best specialist in the field of driving education – teacher of teachers Eriks Grigis, was exclusively chosen as the director of all programmes. Under his leadership, more than 15 experts are working in the team.

And only Presto teaching staff is specially trained to work with school programmes.

2)    Presto author programmes

Where usually a teacher draws up a programme within 1 month, supplementing it with materials collected during practice, Presto team of experts has been working for more than 2 years. Besides, the programme is continually being improved.

The large time and financial investment has resulted in allowing us to offer world-class programmes that are significantly different from other Latvian driving schools. Firstly, by the fact that only Presto has a unified driving school programme – for the first time, the teaching material has been systematised and synchronised between teachers and instructors.

Where in many places presentations compiled 10 years ago are still used as a basis, the teaching material at Presto driving school has been created completely anew – with fresh, original author materials not available anywhere else.

Many teachers buy teaching materials from each other, which makes the teaching material and teaching style varied and inconsistent. Being aware of this problem, Presto teaching materials are created with a unified style: presentations, photographs, and 3D videos.

Interactive training uses a modern pedagogical approach complementing and integrating the narrative with pictures, text and video. Integrating different memorisation strategies helps students remember more easily: some have a dominant auditory memory, while others have a dominant visual memory. According to E. Dale’s Cone of Experience theory, we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear, and 90% of what we say and do ourselves. The programme integrates all these aspects.

Particular attention is paid to preparing the student for the RTSD examination. Since its contents will no longer be known after June 2024, this will be a large added value.

Presto driving school is currently the only school on the market that provides online consultations to its customers to make learning its teaching programmes easier. Cheap alternative products cannot offer such assistance.

3) Results

The RTSD statistics: Presto offers unrivalled RTSD examination results in both theory and driving, continuously ranking among the leaders for over 5 years.

Total costs are 20% lower than anywhere else: with a developed school programme you can achieve results the fastest. More interesting and understandable means spending significantly less time and money.

Finally, we would like to emphasise that our teaching programmes and administrative system are set at the level of higher education. Although this is a field of continuous professional education, focusing on the customer and the desired result allows us to equate ourselves to a university for drivers.

If you need to obtain any driving category, Presto driving school is by far the best choice.