Expanding Access to Driving Tuition for Disabled People 

This funding round aims to increase disabled people's access to driving, by funding organisations that provide driving lessons and car adaptations tailored to people with different disabilities.

It funds organisations that provide driving tuition for disabled people. Organisations can apply for funding to support the continuation or expansion of existing services and support others to access this provision.

Requests can include the costs for vehicles, adaptations, staff costs, approved driving instructor (ADI) costs, training, communication materials and overheads.

Value: £50,000 to £1 million

Duration: 1 to 3 years

Deadline: 31 March 2026

How much funding is available?

We’re awarding grants through this funding round from £50,000 to £1 million over a period of up to three years.   

Your application can be for one, two or three years’ funding. For example, you could apply for £750,000 in total over three years, which would be £250,000 per year. 

What we fund 

Driving tuition for disabled people.
Driving theory test support.
Vehicles with appropriate adaptations for ADIs.
Staff and ADI costs.
Staff and ADI training.

What we do not fund 

Driving test fees.
Theory test fees.

What your grant can be used for 

Your grant can be used for:

Activity which reduces or mitigates barriers to disabled people driving.
Schemes, programmes and initiatives that already exist, and provide best practice solutions, but need support to remain operational or scale up the service they provide to help more disabled people.
Staff and volunteer training or costs.
Full cost recovery grants which include indirect costs.

Your grant cannot be used for

Funding for services and activities that have already been provided.
Overseas travel. 
Construction projects and / or building works. 
Activities or services unrelated to transport for disabled people.
Social investment or venture philanthropy.
Sponsorship for any individual, group or company.
Medical care or medical research.

Who your project can support

Grant funding must be used to support disabled people living in the UK. 

Projects can provide support on a national scale or focus on specific regions, addressing local needs and challenges. 

We're particularly interested in funding projects that deliver meaningful impact in deprived areas, or to underrepresented groups. 

Who can apply

We're particularly interested in applications from DDPOs (Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations).

We can accept applications for funding if your organisation has been active for at least three years and is one of the following:

Incorporated Charity
Company Limited by Guarantee
Community Interest Company (CIC)
Community Benefit Society

We cannot accept applications from:

Unincorporated Associations
Statutory Bodies, Hospitals or Health Authorities
Companies Limited by Shares
Organisations from outside the UK
Individuals
Sole Traders
Political pressure groups, or organisations primarily engaged in political activity
Projects or services that proselytise a specific ethical or religious belief, and/or exclude individuals that do not hold a specific belief

If you are unable to complete an expression of interest and / or application form online, you can share your accessible communication requirements with us. We’re always happy to talk about other ways for you to tell us about your idea.

Governance and finances

To be considered for funding, your organisation’s Board must:

be made up of at least three members, and
the majority of Board members must be unrelated to each other

Applicant organisations should have:

an annual income of at least £50,000 for each of the last three financial years. This is assessed against accounts filed with the relevant regulator. We cannot accept management accounts as evidence of this.
free reserves equivalent to at least three months’ worth of unrestricted expenditure at the point of application.

We will review the latest set of accounts filed to determine the level of free reserves you hold as part of our financial due diligence.

The widely recognised definition of free reserves is:

(total unrestricted funds – unrestricted fixed assets) / total unrestricted expenditure.

If your organisation’s turnover and reserves meet these requirements at the point of application, but falls below them while waiting for your grant to be assessed, we will still consider your application provided the difference between your new position and the requirement is not material (10%+).

We also ask that your organisation holds the following policies and keeps them regularly updated. Copies of these will need to be submitted as part of the application process:

Safeguarding policy
Whistleblowing policy
Equal Opportunities policy

If you’ve already received a grant from us

Please speak to your Grant Manager in the first instance before considering an application.

We're generally unable to consider applications for continuation funding if you have more than six months left on your award.

If you’ve previously applied and been unsuccessful

We aim to provide all organisations with meaningful feedback if their application is unsuccessful.

We ask that unsuccessful applicants do not reapply to the same funding round for at least three months following a decision.

If you were previously unsuccessful and would like to reapply with a similar project, please contact us. We may be able to provide feedback to inform your application.

Organisations we’ve funded

Grants we’ve awarded that are similar to this funding round include:

Disability Action N.I – Grant award £1,113,188. To increase capacity and expand current driving lesson provision across Northern Ireland for disabled people requiring a vehicle with adaptations to enable them to drive.

Driving Mobility – Funding to upgrade current Static assessment rigs to ensure continued quality of clinically led driving assessments for disabled people who wish to return to driving or begin to drive

What you need to do

1. Check that this funding round is the best fit for your project

Please only apply to the funding round that fits most closely with your project and the amount of funding you need to deliver it. We only consider one application at a time.

If you are unsure which funding round to apply to, please contact us.

2. Choose one project idea

We ask that you do not submit multiple applications for the same funding round as we receive a lot of applications and only have a certain amount of funding to award.

We make some difficult decisions around which projects we can fund. For grants awarded in financial years 2022 to 2025, the application success rate was around 1 in 5.

3. Plan your project

We ask all organisations to complete a logframe as part of their application. This is a tool to help people who design projects think logically about:

Outcome: the wider impact your project will achieve.
Outputs: the services or products you will create to achieve the outcome.
Activities: the tasks you will do to create the outputs.
Indicators: how you will measure your success.

The outcomes and outputs will be unique to your project. They are relevant to your region, the people you support, or your planned intervention.

Project indicators are how you measure the success of your project and are generally less bespoke. An example of these are the number of:

disabled people supported,
journeys provided for disabled people, and
training sessions held.

We strongly recommend taking some time to plan your logframe before starting the application process. Organisations we’ve funded have told us that having a clear logframe has really helped them to deliver successful projects.

To help you we’ve created some guidance around completing a logframe (PDF 1.6 MB).

To measure the impact of our funding, there are certain indicators we ask everyone applying to include in their logframe. These can be found on the first tab of our indicator menu spreadsheet (XLSX 32.7 KB).

4. Submit an expression of interest (EOI)

Our EOI application form will ask you about:

your project,
who it will help,
why this project is important,
the difference the project will make, and
how much money you think your project will need.

We’ll also ask you to provide these documents:

your Safeguarding policy,
your latest published annual report and accounts, and
your governing document.

Complete your EOI using our online application form.

You will be asked to create an account and login.
You can save a draft and access updates.
To help you we’ve created EOI sample questions.

5. Complete a full application

If your EOI was successful, you'll be invited to submit a full application using our online application form with the same login details you previously registered.

The full application form will ask you:

about the outcomes, outputs, and indicators in your logframe,
when you’d like your project to start,
how your project will be delivered, and
about any new staff roles your project will involve.

We’ll also ask you to provide these documents:

copies of published annual reports and accounts for the last three years,
your latest available management accounts,
your Whistleblowing policy, and
your Equal Opportunities policy.

We’ve created full application sample questions and a budget template spreadsheet (XLSX 26.1 KB) to support with your application.

What we will do

1. We will review your EOI

Once you’ve submitted an EOI we aim to get back to you within four to six weeks.

If you’re successful we will then invite you to complete a full application.

If you're unsuccessful, we will always try and provide some level of feedback but, due to the large number of applications we receive each year, we cannot always provide detailed feedback, or a follow-up call about every application.

Log back into your online application account to submit your full application.

2. We will carry out checks on your full application

Our application process is designed to minimise the effort of applying for grant funding while ensuring we gather the information we need to make an informed decision.

We aim to respond to all applications for less than £1 million within 12 weeks.

To successfully make a difference, we need to support organisations with the best chance of delivering meaningful impact for disabled people. We will not award a grant if we identify a serious risk that charitable funds may be mismanaged or used ineffectively. To this end our team carry out a number of checks on applications we receive.

Checks carried out under our due diligence framework cover the following six key areas:

governance,
finances,
management,
reputation,
applicant capability, and
proposal feasibility.

We aim to speak to all organisations that submit applications to us, to understand as much as possible about them, and how they support disabled people.

If anything is identified as part of our checks that gives us cause for concern, we may contact you to try and resolve them.

However, if our decision to not accept your application is based on the findings of these checks, then we aim to outline our concerns when you are informed of our decision.

3. Make a decision on your full application

All decisions are made by a panel of staff at the Motability Foundation with both knowledge of grant making, and either direct or indirect experience of the transport challenges faced by disabled people.

For applications of less than £1 million, the panel will always include members of the Foundation’s executive team. This panel will meet monthly on a per-funding round basis.

Help with your application

We have created a set of guidance documents and sample questions to support you through our expression of interest and / or full application form online:

Monitoring and evaluation: logframe guidance (PDF 1.6 MB).
Indicator menu spreadsheet (XLSX 32.7 KB): contains mandatory indicators and examples of indicators to support with creating your logframe.
EOI and full application sample questions.
Budget template spreadsheet (XLSX 26.1 KB).

If you're unable to complete our application form online, you can share your accessible communication requirements with us.

For this or any other questions on our application process, please contact us.

If your full application is not successful

We aim to provide all applicant organisations with meaningful feedback where their application is unsuccessful.

We ask that unsuccessful applicants do not reapply under the same funding round for at least three months following a decision.

If you were previously unsuccessful and would like to reapply with a similar project, please contact us. We may be able to provide feedback to inform your application.

If your full application is successful

If your application for funding is successful, we will aim to let you know within five working days of a decision being made.

Your Grant Manager will get in touch with you to let you know the good news as soon as possible.

We will then send out a grant agreement for you to sign. This is made up of two sections:

The first is specific to your organisation and will be based on the content of your application, so please make sure this is correct, and all targets are achievable.
The second section is the same for every organisation we fund. See an example of one of our grant agreements within our terms and conditions document (PDF 1.0 MB).

Tracking your progress

We ask all organisations we fund to provide us with updates on how their grant is progressing. This is important, as it allows us to ensure that our funding is driving positive change and reaching those who need it most.

Funded organisations are asked to complete a brief six-month monitoring report, and a slightly longer annual monitoring report. Both will include a section on how you are progressing against the targets outlined in your logframe.

In certain circumstances, we may ask organisations to provide us with updates more frequently than twice a year. If this applies to you, then your Grant Manager will let you know.

Our monitoring reports can be accessed and completed through our online application form.

Our six-month monitoring report will simply ask for a straightforward update on your progress against the specific indicators agreed upon during your grant agreement. Alongside a brief update on your achievements and any challenges that may require our support.

Our annual monitoring report will ask you to let us know how your project is progressing and includes the following:

Performance overview - a concise summary of your project’s performance over the reporting period, including a brief reflection on how well the project has progressed against your original plans and targets.
Learning and reflections - an opportunity to tell us about any significant achievements, challenges or proposed changes you might wish to make.
Indicators - you will be asked to report on each indicator within your logframe, mutually agreed at the start of your grant.
Case studies - we encourage you to share short, anonymised case studies that demonstrate the impact of your work and illustrate the benefits of your project.
Financial - submit a detailed summary of your grant expenditure to date, comparing it to the budget you submitted as part of your original application. These reports are intended to track progress and highlight areas that may require attention or adjustments.

External evaluations

We recognise how important it is for organisations to be able to evidence that their work delivers a real impact for disabled people.

Robust evidence puts organisations in a stronger fundraising position and allows them to better advocate for the people they support.

Any grant we award for more than £750,000 will include funding for an external evaluation of the project.

To help with carrying out an external evaluation we have produced a set of evaluation FAQs.

If you have any questions or concerns about commissioning an external evaluation on your project, please reach out to your Grant Manager who may be able to put you in touch with our Monitoring and Evaluation team.