Life as a Cycle Instructor

STORY: LONDON CYCLIST MAGAZINE

I trained as a National Standard cycling instructor in summer 2018. It was a hot week and the course days were long. And by the end of it, once I’d completed my ‘onboarding’ with the London provider I worked for on a freelance basis, I was thrown into the world of cycle instruction myself.

My first job was in a school, covering for a fellow instructor who couldn’t make that day. It was overwhelming. Just getting there was a challenge as it was pouring down, but eventually the rain stopped and the lesson started. However, the other instructor I was assigned to work with was clearly not impressed, and neither was I; the reality was a long way from what I’d imagined. However I stuck to it, I got better and started to enjoy the work I did.

I didn’t just work with children in schools, as the main reason I trained as an instructor in the first place was to help women to cycle. It turned out that I enjoyed my one-to-one sessions with local women much more than the work in schools, and quite quickly I had more demands than time to fulfil them.

Cycling instructors are a small but mighty workforce within London’s cycling community, not just teaching Bikeability in schools, but also helping adults to become confident on their bikes. This includes ‘learn to ride’ sessions and also helping people to navigate London’s roads and discover the cycling infrastructure network we already have.

Being a cycling instructor is a wonderful job, it’s a profession where you make people happy and help them to make positive changes to their lives. It also comes with a lot of responsibility, such as taking out children who you have just met on a cycle skills assessment on the roads. There are often eight to 10 children with two instructors.

In fact something which I wasn’t aware of when I set out on my teaching journey were the poor working conditions for many instructors.

For example, for every one-to-one session you do with London’s biggest provider, it often results in up to an hour’s extra unpaid admin work. And when instructors work in schools they are expected to find training sites, write up risk assessments and do general admin tasks with minimal extra pay, which doesn’t cover the time it takes to do this all in a responsible way.

Plus if a booking gets cancelled we often don’t get any pay at all, unless it’s extremely short notice — this can mean a quarter of monthly earnings being wiped out in one go. It’s also worth noting, especially during a cost of living crisis, that many instructors haven’t received a payrise in over 10 years (except for a small 90p per hour increase, which didn’t cover inflation).

Luckily there are some positives. Boroughs such as Islington and Camden, providers like JoyRiders and employers like London Cycling Campaign pay a much higher hourly rate, pay admin time and have a fair cancellation policy. However, this is far from being standard in the industry. A recent tender in London’s richest borough chose a provider with a low instructor pay rate which was a major blow to the workforce.

Instructors unionised in late 2019, having joined the Independent Workers of Great Britain and formed the Cycling Instructors Branch. If you want to support your instructors, or become one yourself, please do get in touch.

This article was originally published in London Cyclist spring 2024, London Cycling Campaign’s exclusive member’s magazine. Join as a member today for quarterly copies of London Cyclist delivered to your door, free legal advice, discounts in independent bike shops across London, and much more…