As with most chauffeur courses, RoSPA standard tuition and subsequent test pass, (hopefully anyway), is the benchmark and this is what kicks off the course as you’d expect. I missed this part due to work commitments but the feedback from my fellow students was largely positive, although a couple did say they’d have liked a bit more concentrated instruction if time had allowed.
To be fair to the PDSCA, it does run a longer course for those people who want to gain the protection driver skill set ‘from scratch’ as it were, but given this course is purposely shortened to accommodate working chauffeurs, it’s just not possible to fit more in. After seeing everything for myself, I’ve got to be honest and say if you’re looking for a course that covers advanced driving specifically in more detail, this probably isn’t the right one for you, but I can assure you all the other elements of protection driving covered on this course more than make up for it, and then some.
So who’s doing the teaching? Well, this training is modelled on the police’s national protection driving course and I have to say the subject matter experts employed to put it across are exceptional and the experience they have to impart is very genuinely worth its weight in gold. The instructors include several ex-royal and ministerial protection officers, (including a PM’s former team leader who has only recently left the job), ‘civilian’ lead and back-up drivers employed by senior Middle Eastern families, surveillance experts of the highest order and police advanced driving specialists.
There were actually a couple of times during the course where I found myself pausing for a moment just to take stock of the sheer level of expertise on hand, and I take my hat off to the course director for having those kinds of contacts to call upon because it really is very impressive to say the least.
