Dutch driver training aims to teach aspiring drivers to acquire the skills needed to drive a car, to apply traffic rules and to teach them how to behave in traffic. Higher-order skills that are troublesome for young people (see the question Why is crash risk higher for young drivers?) are hardly practiced at all. Yet, these skills are essential to safe traffic participation. This is one of the reasons why a strong link between driver training and crash risk for young drivers is hard to ascertain (see SWOV fact sheet Driver training and driving tests).
In the Netherlands, freedom of education is laid down by law. Therefore, the government cannot impose what topics should come up during driving lessons. That is why the Netherlands, in contrast to other countries, does not have a national curriculum. Driver training topics are therefore largely determined by what is tested during driving tests. This implies that, in spite of their importance to road safety, a number of skills that are hard or impossible to test are not addressed at all. Examples of these omissions are risk acceptance, self-awareness, and resilience to peer pressure [24] [41] [42] [43]. Young drivers will have to develop these higher-order skills by clocking up mileage behind the wheel. At the time of writing this fact sheet (July 2021), experiments to reduce crash risk for young drivers are underway [44] [45]. For more information about driver training and driving tests in the Netherlands, see SWOV fact sheet Driver training and driving tests.
