Before getting into the passenger seat with your eager driver, why not take some driving lessons yourself?

When I was going through driving tuition, more moons ago than I’d want to recall, one of my mates told me that he wouldn’t pass his test again, because of the way he now drove.

Despite having driven safely and without incident for over 20 years, he was sure that during that time he’d developed too many bad habits which could lead him to fail.

The example he made reference to was crossing one hand over the other when turning the steering wheel – one thing that I’ve always conscientiously avoided, because of him.

His words came back to me recently when one of my own children started to learn to drive. It raised the question: what bad habits had I picked up in 25 years of driving?

I’d already checked that I met the legal minimum requirements for providing driving lessons – namely that I was over 21 (by just a few years…), held a clean driving licence for the type of car my daughter was driving and that I’d had my licence for at least three years.

However, there’s a lot more to teaching someone to drive successfully than these three attributes. For a start, you require extreme patience, the heart of a lion (for the first few trips at least) and the diplomacy of a United Nations Ambassador.

And if that’s not enough, you need to recall the “correct procedure” (as per The Highway Code) for every manoeuvre that you may need to execute on the roads of Britain. Now, I can perform parallel park with the best of them, but not necessarily as per the book, I suspect.

So I realised that it would make sense for anyone charged with the responsibility of tutoring a learner driver to take some refresher driving lessons beforehand – to rid them of any bad habits they’ve acquired since passing their own test.