WORKING LASSES
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For many truck drivers aiming to become operators by passing their CPC, an intensive classroom course is a necessary evil. We joined budding hauliers on one in Milton Keynes.
• If the thought of going back to the classroom fills you with horror, forget Dave Platt's CPC training course. His intensive courses for the Certificate of Professional Competence are gruelling, but he claims a 97% first-time success rate.
Platt, of Milton Keynes, runs four domestic and international courses a year. The domestic one lasts five days: lessons start at 08:30hrs, finishing at 17:00hrs. Of the 268 students sitting June's exam, only seven failed to score the 75% pass mark.
He starts from the prem,le that none of his pupils know anything in the syllabus. In fact, most probably know something. Classes include drivers, office workers and haulier's wives; drivers tend to know the hours law but are not too familiar with the business side.
Accountants and managers, on the other hand, cope with the vehicle costing calculations, but find they are baffled by axle configurations and regulations for drivers' breaks. Platt devotes one day to each section in the syllabus — entering the profession, technical, business, road safety and law.
Concentration is needed throughout. Dreamers are shaken when Platt fires a question on what he has just been talking about at some unsuspecting soul: "What is the maximum fortnightly driving limit?"
CALCULATION
By the end of the week most of us can rattle off in our sleep the calculation for depreciation, the period that maintenance records must be kept for, and the maximum length of a Special Types truck. The only worry is whether we will be able to remember these in the exam, which for us was one week later, but for others was a month away.
Some, like Arnold Mills, a driver for Whittle in Lowestoft, have not sat behind a desk for 25 years. He has worked in haulage for 22 years and wants to set up as an owner-operator, but he is worried about the business and law parts of the course. "I have no definite plans, but everybody's got to have a bit of ambition. You don't want to be doing the same thing for the rest of your life," he says.
Trevor Winter effectively runs his father's farm haulage business in Suffolk, but his father holds the operator's licence and Winter is keen to be able to qualify for his own. He says the course is tough, but as he works in the industry much of it is already familiar. He plans to take his international CPC later.
BRS Southern sends most of its contract hire salesmen on Platt's courses and six are on ours. They handle the financial side with ease and say the drivers' hours and technical sections simply have to be learned by rote. Everyone, says Platt, experiences difficulty with at least one part of the syllabus.
The CPC is routinely criticised by those who sit, teach and adminster it. Some say it is a "Mickey Mouse" memory test rather than a true test of an individual's competence to run a haulage firm. Certainly most of the facts which soak in over a week's intensive study are forgotten within weeks of sitting the exam.
Platt readily admits his main aim is to shunt as many people through the exam as possible, rather than train students to become operators. However, he does provide a syllabus manual which is meant to be used as a reference tool after the exam as well as for revision.
Platt, who employs one other instruc tor, and whose wife runs the administrative side of the business, will open new centres in Felixstowe and Carlisle in December.
He spends much of his time in Holland where he also teaches the Royal Society of Arts CPC syllabus.
He charges £250 for the domestic course and £150 for the international, with a promise of money back in full for those who do not pass.
Contact Dale Auto Training and Transport on (0234) 750131.
El by Murdo Morrison