Birmingham (Shirley) test centre: 56.6% pass rate, £292 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Birmingham (Shirley) conducted 9,385 car practical tests and issued 5,309 passes. The resulting 56.6% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 82nd of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 3rd of 26 in West Midlands.

That is 6.5 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 10.4 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 56.6% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.77 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Birmingham (Shirley) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.77 times, or £110. Add 0.77 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 £183. The test cycle at Birmingham (Shirley) is therefore about £292. Testing here therefore saves about £70 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Birmingham (Shirley) costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 16.2 weeks in July 2026, 4.3 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.77 expected retakes that is about 12.4 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,076 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.2% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 4,791 first attempts at Birmingham (Shirley), 2,795 passed, a rate of 58.3%, which is 1.8 points above the all-attempts figure. 360 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 7.51% 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.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Birmingham (Shirley) has risen by 7.6 points, from 49.0% to 56.6%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,621 to 9,385 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £82 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 57.9% and female candidates at 54.7%, a gap of 3.3 points across 5,521 and 3,864 tests. Automatic tests made up 36.1% of the workload and passed at 49.8%, 6.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 51.9% in October 2025 to 63.1% in April 2025, a 11.2-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in West Midlands runs more than five points ahead of Birmingham (Shirley) on pass rate, so travelling elsewhere is unlikely to pay for itself once you add an unfamiliar route, the travel and the settling-in lessons. The cheaper lever here is preparation on the roads your instructor already knows.