The short answer
At least ten driving lessons in a manual during your training, plus an internal test drive of 15 minutes with your own instructor. That test drive is not an exam and does not happen at the testing organisation. The practical test itself you sit in an automatic.
B197 is not a licence class of its own but class B with a special rule: you train mainly in an automatic, prove the manual separately, and may drive both afterwards. The ten lessons are the heart of that rule.
Ten is a minimum, not a target
The number is fixed, your ability is not. Anyone still stalling on a hill after ten lessons drives an eleventh and a twelfth — the test drive only happens once it makes sense. In practice ten is enough for most people, because by then the whole traffic competence is already there and genuinely all that is new is the left foot.
What the test drive asks for
- Moving off and changing gear in moving traffic
- Changing down and braking on the approach to a junction
- A hill start without rolling back
- The relationship between gear, speed and engine revs
Fifteen minutes with your own instructor, in the car you know, on roads you know. No examiner, no appointment at the testing organisation, no fee. Your instructor then confirms in writing that you can handle a manual — and that confirmation goes with your papers when you are entered for the test.
There is no failing it
If the test drive does not go well it is repeated after you have practised. It is a confirmation, not a filter — and because it does not happen at the testing organisation, a repeat costs no test fee either.
When the manual lessons happen
Usually in the last third, once driving itself is settled. That is the real trick of B197: you learn traffic and gears one after the other instead of together — and the same junction that overwhelms you in lesson three is routine by lesson twenty, which is exactly when you can pick up the clutch alongside it.
What ends up on your licence
Key number 197 — and nothing that restricts you. You may drive manual and automatic, indefinitely. The difference from B78, where the automatic restriction has to be struck out afterwards, is exactly that one line. The details are on the B197 page; what the manual lessons cost is on the prices page.