Blyth test centre: 50.9% pass rate, £317 to get through it.

Blyth is a mid-sized centre, putting 6,973 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 3,551 passed, so the centre finished the year on 50.9% and 184th of 308 nationally, 7th of 11 within North East.

That lands within 0.9 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 2.5 points above the 48.4% North East average, which makes Blyth an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 50.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.96 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Blyth pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.96 times, or £122. Add 0.96 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North East rate of £29 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £196. The test cycle at Blyth is therefore about £317. That is within £10 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Blyth is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

A fail at Blyth costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 13.5 weeks in July 2026, 1.6 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.96 expected retakes that is about 13 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,322 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.5% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 3,526 first attempts at Blyth, 1,901 passed, a rate of 53.9%, which is 3.0 points above the all-attempts figure. 108 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.06% 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 Blyth has fallen by 9.8 points, from 60.7% to 50.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,551 to 6,973 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £84 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 49.7% and female candidates at 52.4%, a gap of 2.7 points across 3,799 and 3,174 tests. Automatic tests made up 25.9% of the workload and passed at 39.4%, 11.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 46.3% in June 2025 to 56.1% in January 2026, a 9.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in North East runs more than five points ahead of Blyth 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.