Hey all, just had a thought nibbling at the back of my brain, nothing major but… When a new Driver undertakes his ADR Course and exams etc and gets his/her certificate and shells out approx £700 lets say, after 5 years and renewing the certificate, how long and how much is the refresher training to give the driver another 5 year certificate? thanks in advance Martin.
wilko77fc:
Hey all, just had a thought nibbling at the back of my brain, nothing major but… When a new Driver undertakes his ADR Course and exams etc and gets his/her certificate and shells out approx £700 lets say, after 5 years and renewing the certificate, how long and how much is the refresher training to give the driver another 5 year certificate? thanks in advance Martin.
Hi wilko77fc,
“Approx £700” for an ADR licence is a bit much, there are plenty of providers around who are at least £100 cheaper than that.
In answering your question, am I correct to assume that you’re asking about a full 5-day ADR course that includes the tanker module please?
The rules for ADR refreshers are:
A refresher must be taken within the last year of validity.
A refresher cannot be taken within the last five weeks of validity.
There are two answers to your question…
Option #1
As the rules currently stand, you can ‘refresh’ a 5-day ADR course in just over 2.5 days, but this assumes that you’ve retained a lot of info from your initial course and so you’re just being ‘updated.’
You’d get the same info as on the 5-day course, but it comes at you at twice the speed, which leaves most of the guys with spinning heads.
However, my experience in teaching refreshers is that the guys struggle, which is reflected in the poorer refresher exam pass rates.
If you fail a refresher, you have to take an initial course to get back to your former position.
You get any unexpired portion of your present ADR ticket added to your new one, so you don’t even lose a single day.
However, you can go back to ADR work the very next day after finishing the course, cos you still have a valid ADR licence.
You can only get 1 day DCPC for an ADR refresher.
With this option, you can only refresh your present entitlements.
Of course, you can expect this to be cheaper than a 5-day course, but, there is an element of ‘rolling the dice’ in that 
Option #2
You can sit an initial course as a ‘refresher’ candidate and get the best of both worlds.
The info comes at you at normal speed, so you have a much better chance of passing the exams.
There’s more time to ask questions.
You still get any unexpired portion of your present ADR ticket added to your new one, so you don’t even lose a single day.
You can still go back to ADR work the very next day after finishing the course, cos you still have a valid ADR licence.
You can get 3 days DCPC if you do it this way.
With this option, you can refresh your present entitlements AND add new entitlements if you wish.
Although option #2 is more expensive, it does seem to suit most people, but depending on who is paying, the final choice is yours (or your boss) to make.
Many thanks for your time to post that about ADR, that helps alot your a legend!