Featherstone Driving Test Centre Pass Rate 2024-25

Featherstone is a DVSA practical car testing site in the Wakefield district of West Yorkshire, located in the WF7 postcode. The centre serves candidates from Featherstone, Pontefract, Normanton and the surrounding district. It is the lowest-rate centre in West Yorkshire in the 2024-25 data, sitting more than 13 percentage points below the next centre in the county.

The gender gap at Featherstone is one of the smallest recorded at any DVSA centre of this size: men passed at 34.3% and women at 33.8% in 2024-25, a difference of just 0.5 percentage points. The national gender gap is 1.9 points. The near-zero gap here does not indicate that either group is doing well in absolute terms; both are passing at around one in three attempts, which is among the lowest figures in England.

#The volume surge and its effect on the pass rate

Featherstone conducted 5,367 tests in 2016-17 and returned a 45.6% pass rate. By 2024-25 the test volume had grown to 14,070, an increase of 162%. Over that same period the pass rate fell from 45.6% to 34.1%. The decline is not entirely caused by the volume increase, but the relationship is plausible: as a centre grows rapidly it draws in more retakers from adjacent areas and more candidates who are booking tests before they are fully prepared. Both groups depress the headline pass rate.

The sharpest single-year drop came between 2022-23 and 2023-24, when the pass rate fell from 38.5% to 33.6% as test volume jumped from 8,397 to 13,534. The 2024-25 figure of 34.1% is essentially flat against that 2023-24 low, suggesting the centre may have reached a new equilibrium rather than continuing to fall.

#Featherstone compared to nearby West Yorkshire centres

Pontefract at 2.2 miles returned 47.8% in 2024-25, a difference of 13.7 percentage points. That gap is large enough to have a real effect on average outcomes. Candidates who live in the WF7 or WF8 area and can travel to Pontefract should compare wait times: if availability is similar, Pontefract is the substantially stronger statistical choice. Wakefield at 5.7 miles returned 46.7%, also more than 12 points above Featherstone. Barnsley at 10 miles and 52.2% is more than 18 points above, but the greater distance requires route familiarity with South Yorkshire roads rather than the West Yorkshire routes most Featherstone candidates will have practiced.

#Preparing for the Featherstone test

Featherstone test routes use the roads around the WF7 postcode, including sections of Station Lane, Wakefield Road and the approaches to the Purston Jaglin area. Routes typically extend into Normanton and toward the A639 corridor. The road environment mixes suburban residential streets with A-road junctions that carry moderately heavy traffic, and candidates should prepare for Give Way sequences emerging onto priority roads with limited sightlines.

Given the low pass rate, one practical step is to ask the instructor specifically which fault categories are most common on the routes used for this test centre. The nationally top-ranked fail categories (junction observation, mirror use) apply everywhere, but local knowledge of where this particular examiner team tends to see errors can help focus pre-test drills on the specific sequences that appear on Featherstone routes.

#Sources and further reading

The figures, fees, and procedures referenced in this article are verifiable on the official gov.uk pages below. PassRates.uk is built on the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency’s open data, published under the Open Government Licence.

• Driving test (gov.uk)
• If you fail your driving test (gov.uk)
• Driving test and theory test data, cars (gov.uk)
• Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (gov.uk)
• Open Government Licence v3.0 (nationalarchives.gov.uk)