The place to go for ground school, but maybe not as a modular student

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Submitted by James C on

This Review Overall Rating

Positives:

-Tuition

This was my 2nd series at ATPL's due to some problems I had during my first attempt, and I can safely say that without the effort of the instructors I had at Oxford, Gordon King, Alan Sutton, Graeme Wood, Phil King, Richard Bellaby, Paul Smith & Andrew Ashman to put names out there, I know that I wouldn't be in the position im in today. They nailed my learning style to a T and had a great way of interacting with all the students in my class, being modular we had a variety of languages in the group but everyone was catered for 

-24/7 Access

The building is open 24/7 to students which is a huge perk, during the day there is a guard office but car passes and ID's are set up to show on arrival. During the course heading home with housemates and studying at home was the norm however approaching exams we all found our own methods. I found going in at night the best for me, taking in my own food and drink meeting up with people to burn the midnight oil at 1am with access to a whiteboard was great.

-Set-up of Course

Oxford run the ground school course in a fantastic way, you go into Phase 1 with the first 7 subjects which are the "basis" of the ground school. AGK, HPL, MET, Performance, POF, Comms & Instruments. Although having 7 subjects to learn seems and is alot, it makes all the subjects remaining in phase 2 much easier as you have an understanding and basis that will transfer across to other subjects so I found it quite nice to do, but equally this can be a con as learning 7 BIG subjects at one time is alot to process, however this is shown to you by a variety of CBT and progress tests. at the end of each day you would be required to do computer based training with a variety of videos to watch with some tests at the end of it going over what you did during the day, "cementing" what you had learnt from your instructor, and then 2 weeks before caa test you would do the schools own progress tests which again were a good level to see where you were at with your leaning 

- Material

The material provided was CAE's own books, which are given to you in book format and also PDF format. No need for the gym lugging this around each day got you some exercise. Having editable PDS's were nice for revision but as the books are YOURS, you can highlight and write all over them which for me was great and still to this day have kept them as its good to keep knowledge going

Negatives:

- Modular Student Support

Sadly from the outset you do feel as a bit of an outsider at the academy as soon as you say your a "modular" student. The school is very much geared up toward MPL and integrated, more so MPL but modular is very much bottom of the rung even though we gave better results than some of the integrated students. We were in separated classes from the other guys and so a bit of a divide was created. 

When we passed there was absolutely no follow ups to see how we were getting on and to my knowledge no support exists for modular students for getting jobs, I can appreciate that isn't down to them but we all need a little help to get foot on the ladder 

- Subject Setup

Put this down in both pros and cons. I personally enjoyed the 7/7 split of subjects but some others might not so thought best to put it in both 

- Accomodation 

This is a bit of a headache... there is accommodation provided on site by CAE, however it is only for integrated and MPL students, harking back to my first con. Finding accommodation in and around oxford isn't too bad as the school has been around for a while so often word of mouth or dedicated student houses are available, only downside is, as it is oxford it is often expensive, I was paying just shy of 600p/m for a room... 

- Communication

This was a very mixed bag depending on who was in the office, there was no consistency. I went to oxford in the mind to do the waypoint program at a set price.... 2 months in they hit us with a bill saying waypoint has been increased to 60k.. with absolutely no heads up or prior warning. it was very poor. also trying to get uniform or a question answered at points took 2 weeks... but others would reply in a few hours.

Overall although the cons are lengthy, I wouldn't be in my current position without getting these 14 exams passed and Im very confident I wouldn't have done so without the help of oxford so forever grateful for their efforts 

Course(s) taken:

General

Facilities

4

Atmosphere

3

Student Support

4

Customer Service

4

Communication

2

Graduation Support

1

Social Life

3

Theoretical Training

Quality of Instruction

5

Instructors Per Student

4

Extra Tuition Support

5

Value for Money

5

Learning Material

4

Classroom Overall

4

Class Size

3

Class/Life Balance

2