Truth about scrapping K53

South Africa’s K53 learner’s and driver’s licence test programme itself is not the reason why the country’s drivers are among the worst in the world.

Instead, government incompetence and “stupidity” broke the key structures on which the K53 curriculum relied to ensure it could deliver competent drivers.

That is according to road safety and driver training expert Rob Handfield-Jones in response to a recent article by the Free Market Foundation’s Nicholas Woode-Smith.

Woode-Smith said that the country’s abhorrent traffic safety record was a clear indication something was wrong with the way the country licenced new drivers.

He argued for the scrapping of the K53 system as “nobody drives or parks the way” the system required.

Handfield-Jones said the “something wrong” with the licence testing procedure was that half of the licences were bought, forged, or illegal, as several Special Investigating Unit probes have found.

“The problem is not K53, but the instructors and examiners who gatekeep the K53 standard, who are solely to blame if the standard is abrogated,” he told MyBroadband.

Handfield-Jones explained the decline in South Africa’s average annual road fatality rate that started in 1985, steepened significantly after the introduction of the K53 in 1990.

He said this decline held course until the country’s roads became overrun by incompetence resulting from licensing corruption that began to dominate in the late 1990s.

“The failure of the K53 system began when the South African government neutered the requirement for learner driving instructors to be qualified to a very high standard in 1996.

“The industry very rapidly transitioned from a collection of top-class professionals whose pupils routinely got first-time passes, to a predomination of chancers whose own driving standards, charitably, are suspect,” Handfield-Jones argued.

“K53 requires a quality instructor to teach it, and the flood of poor-quality instructors into the industry after the emasculation of the instructor’s test was what drove up the failure rate.”

“Before 1996, we could get a test at any testing station with two or three days’ notice. Government broke that, and the price was an epidemic of licensing corruption.”

Handfield-Jones said this change opened the doors to corruption among learners who had failed several times because of poor quality instruction and wanted to know if there was ‘another way’ to get their licence.

“It is government’s fault for creating corruption-prone bottlenecks in the bookings system and deprofessionalising the learner driver instructor industry,” he said.

“They allowed all and sundry to take on the title of ‘driving instructor’ despite not having the smallest clue about traffic law or driver education.”

Handfield-Jones also took issue with people complaining about not having to alley dock or parallel park their vehicle regularly, as is necessary to pass the K53 test.

He explained the method taught by the K53 was also relevant in the previous K52 South African driving test.

“The method dates from World War II and has been used successfully by hundreds of millions of drivers,” he said.

“It’s so simple that someone who can already drive could learn it from a book.”

While Handfield-Jones differed from Woode-Smith on many points, they were in total agreement in two respects.

Firstly, he believes the current yard test based on a single session with an instructor should be removed.

Instead, a driver illustrating competence in the K53 curriculum should be issued with a certificate signed by a qualified instructor confirming they had demonstrated parking manoeuvres to the standard set down in the curriculum.

Handfield-Jones has also proposed a return to the K52 standard for rolling, allowing up to 15cm instead of no roll.

He explained that reverse rolling incidents very rarely resulted in serious accidents or injury of pedestrians.

Handfield-Jones added that the K53 contained nothing that one wouldn’t hear in defensive driving courses used in many other countries.

However, he took issue with the current system using educational rather than training-based licensing.

“As a result, it is pedantic, heavily systematised, and, as an entry-level standard, lacks the depth one would find in a post-licence course,” he said.

“It is also in need of updates to account for progress in vehicle technology and traffic law.”

“But the basic curriculum, if properly taught and examined, should produce a competent driver.”

Handfield-Jones recommended that people seeking a change should ask the Road Traffic Management Corporation what happened to its K53 update project, which was supposed to address some of the curriculum’s shortcomings.

Nonetheless, he said updating the curriculum would be a waste of time if it was still being taught and administered through a corrupt system.