Under plans being considered by the Government the principles of safe driving may be included in the school curriculum. Learner drivers will have to keep a record of their training, undertake a minimum period of practice and demonstrate that they have a responsible attitude rather than just the basic skills to pass the test.

The Driving Standards Agency is also examining the Swedish system, under which young people can start having lessons on public roads at 16 and accumulate 120 hours of training before taking their tests. The existing 40-minute practical driving test may be expanded into two stages and cover a broader range of skills, including driving at night and on different types of road. Under the current system, young drivers are not required to have any formal training before taking their tests.

Early results from a major study on young driver safety, to be published by the Department for Transport this summer, reveal that young males have the best pass rates in the driving test despite being the most dangerous drivers. As a group, they tend to achieve the highest scores after the fewest lessons.

But their skills do not make them safe: a separate study shows that male drivers aged 17 to 20 are almost ten times more likely to be killed or seriously injured behind the wheel than men aged 40 to 59.

Young women are far less likely to have serious crashes, with only 276 deaths and injuries last year among women drivers aged 17 to 19, compared with 869 among males.

In an interview with The Times, Stephen Ladyman, the Road Safety Minister, said that there would have to be “fundamental changes to the way we teach people to drive and the way we test them”.

He rejected the idea of temporary restrictions on young drivers after they had passed their test, such as a late-night curfew or a ban on carrying more than one passenger, as these would be very difficult to enforce. Instead, he favoured reforms aimed at eradicating the reckless attitude to road safety among some young drivers before they passed their tests. Mr Ladyman said that the Government would consider introducing a much more rigorous learning process.

“We may need to start doing driver education while young people are still at school, introducing them to the rules, dangers and responsibilities of the road at a much earlier age.

“We have developed this attitude that you first learn to pass the test and then you learn to drive. It’s an option to have more formal training. We have to debate whether there should be some level of compulsion.”

Driving instructors were good at teaching skills but did not necessarily foster a safe attitude among their pupils, he added, and the existing driving test needed to be improved. “It may need to be expanded signi-ficantly and made much more thorough.”

Mr Ladyman was reluctant to consider raising the driving age from 17 to 18, saying that it would be unfair to young people who needed cars to get to work or college. The Department for Transport intends to publish proposals for reforming young driver training in the next few weeks.