Birmingham (Cocks Moors) test centre: 53.5% pass rate, £323 to get through it.

Birmingham (Cocks Moors) is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 486 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 260 were passes, giving 53.5%. At that volume a run of two or three unusual weeks moves the annual figure visibly, so treat the number as a guide to the roads rather than a precise ranking. It sits 124th of 308 nationally and 5th of 26 in West Midlands.

That is 3.5 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 7.3 points above the 46.2% West Midlands average. A centre in this band is usually working quieter road layouts with fewer forced lane decisions, not a softer marking standard: the DVSA marking sheet is national.

Turn 53.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.87 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Birmingham (Cocks Moors) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.87 times, or £116. Add 0.87 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the West Midlands rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £207. The test cycle at Birmingham (Cocks Moors) is therefore about £323. Testing here therefore saves about £39 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Birmingham (Cocks Moors) was 3.1 weeks in July 2026, 8.8 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.87 expected retakes add only around 2.7 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 416 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.0% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 137 first attempts at Birmingham (Cocks Moors), 76 passed, a rate of 55.5%, which is 2.0 points above the all-attempts figure. 13 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 9.49% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Male candidates passed at 56.4% and female candidates at 45.9%, a gap of 10.5 points across 351 and 135 tests. Automatic tests made up 31.9% of the workload and passed at 46.5%, 7.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium.

Among centres of a similar size in West Midlands, Hereford runs 5.3 points higher at 58.8%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £50 of expected difference. Before moving, price the switch: a new instructor or extra travel for route familiarity typically costs £60 to £120 plus two settling-in lessons, which eats most of a gap under about eight points.