In 1988, the UK's Road Traffic Law Review recommended that there be a pilot study of one-day retraining in basic driving skills, to find out how far it produces lasting improvements in offenders' driving skills. Although this driver improvement experiment was not incorporated into UK legislation, the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, the Devon County Council Road Safety Unit, and the Crown Prosecution Service agreed that such an experiment was worthy of further consideration. The Devon initiative, now known as the National Driver Improvement Scheme (NDIS), is receiving steadily increasing support nationally and includes the course content and structure that is now the National Model. In 1996, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) commissioned a two-year study to evaluate the effectiveness of the NDIS in the UK. This paper presents this study, which aims to assess the effectiveness of the NDIS as an alternative to court prosecution for minor traffic offences. 1821 drivers contributed to the study, and attended courses at eight service provider sites from October 1997 to September 1998. The paper describes the study procedure, and results obtained for clients' perception of the NDIS course, self-reported driving behaviour, and attitude modification. Significant short-term changes of attitude and driving behaviour were observed.
Samenvatting