Since 2015
About Nine and Three
Queensland-accredited driving lessons based in Springwood, Logan
Grant taught for a large multi-branch driving school across Brisbane's south side for eleven years before he opened Nine and Three in 2015. He kept meeting the same two kinds of learner: ones who could handle a demonstration car beautifully in a quiet car park and then froze the moment they had to read a real intersection on their own, and ones who had banked their hundred hours but had never once been shown where their hands actually belonged on the wheel. Both groups had been taught to finish a lesson, not to drive.
The turning point came on a Tuesday in 2017, on a re-test out of the old Loganholme centre. A learner Grant had taken over partway through his lessons failed on a give-way at a roundabout he had driven past a dozen times, not because he did not know the rule but because his hands were never set in a position to react to it in time. Grant drove him home, put him in the driver's seat in his own driveway, and spent forty minutes on nothing but hand position and mirror timing. The learner passed on his second attempt three weeks later and told Grant it was the first lesson that had ever felt like it was actually about him. That is the lesson Nine and Three has built every booking around since.
We chose Springwood because it sits at the point where Logan's quiet cul-de-sacs meet the roundabouts, the Pacific Motorway on-ramps and the ridge road up to the lookout over Brisbane, which means a learner can cover an entire logbook's worth of real conditions without leaving a twenty-minute radius. Today there are four of us: Grant and two other Queensland-accredited instructors on the road most days, and Renae running the diary, the logbook paperwork and the test-day bookings, which in a business built on appointments and hours matters as much as anything that happens behind the wheel. We have taught a bit over nineteen hundred learners since 2015, in cars fitted for both auto and manual, and every one of them left the first lesson knowing exactly where their hands belonged before they knew a single road rule.
What we hold to
Four plain rules, not a mission statement
- Hands at nine and three before the car moves an inch
- The same instructor for every lesson in a booked pack, roster permitting
- A logbook signed on the spot, not chased up later
- No guarantees about passing, only about being told the truth about readiness
What we won't do
The other side of the same rules
- Guarantee a pass, or promise a particular result on a particular test date
- Tell a scare story about test failure to sell an extra lesson
- Swap a learner between instructors mid-pack without asking first, roster permitting
- Sign a logbook hour that wasn't actually driven
Accreditation
How the school and its cars are credentialed
- Driver trainers accredited by Queensland's Department of Transport and Main Roads
- Working with Children Check held by every instructor
- Dual-control vehicles maintained to Queensland's driving instructor vehicle standard
- Public liability insurance, certificate available on request
Since 2015
1,900+
Learners taught since 2015
Across Springwood and the Logan suburbs around it
74%
First-attempt practical test pass rate
Self-reported by learners who let us know their result, averaged over the last three years
19
Average bonus logbook hours banked per learner
Using the instructor hour-for-three rule across a typical 7 to 8 lesson booking
3
TMR-accredited instructors on the road
Plus one bookings and test-day coordinator
2,600+
Lessons delivered a year
Across weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings