An examination of what the currently available data can tell us about the effects on offence and crash history of two driver education programs

Practice and ProDrive are driver education programmes aimed at novice drivers in New Zealand. The target audience of Practice is learner licence holders. The program encourages them to gain 120 hours supervised driving and provides them with training materials including CD-Drives, a multimedia tool designed to improve hazard perception skills. ProDrive is open to all licence holders and concentrates on in-car skills training in an off-road environment. This paper examines the offence and crash history of individuals who registered for Practice or who attended ProDrive. In the analysis these individuals were matched to a licence database of restricted and full licence holders and then compared, where possible, to offence and crash data at 6 month intervals after obtaining their restricted or full licence.
This revealed that those who had registered for or attended one of these educational programs had
significantly (p