Horse wrote:About 10 years back, IAM had two civvie bike examiners but who both had police-awarded Class 1 certificates.
I would be very surprised if this was the case.
The difference between a 1 and a 2 classifications was based no the persons marks during an advanced course. Historically, a driver's classification also had a bearing on what police vehicles the driver could drive operationally. An example of this was that you used to have to be a 1 to drive for the Robbery Squad. (The Sweeney) I believe that in years gone by the squad did use civilian drivers who must have passed the appropriate test to drive operationally, but they were not instructors. I remember back in the 1990s when the Met was trialling different high performance cars, there was a Porsche Club Sport something or other, an M3 and other similar vehicles. The instruction was that only some 1s could drive these vehicles, not 2s, and not some of the staff at the driving school because they did not hold the required classification.
I used to work with an ex-civilian instructor who then joined the police. He had to go back to the driving school for an advanced course because he had never taken one. He had done an instructors course, but that was different. He was most embarrassed because he only got a 2 on his advanced course after instructing for years!
I can not think of when a civilian instructor would drive police vehicles operationally. By this I mean outside of their driving school role. Civilian instructors tend to have the classification of 'instructor'. This allows them to use vehicles for instructional purposes, but not to drive them operationally. For instance if there was a shortage of drivers at a traffic base or an area car driver had gone sick and there was a spare civilian instructor, that instructor would not and could not drive the traffic car / area car operationally with a non-driving officer as a passenger to do all of the work if that makes sense?
In which area did these bike examiners work?