Puritan,
Interesting post, but I thought Astraeus/Bond/Global whatever had already run A320 courses, as one of my former students told me he did his course through them, before going off to Italy for a job.
As far as I recall he did the sim training in Cranebank and the base training on some executive A319 ( he grinned for about a week after that)
Feel free to correct me, so that I can smack the youg whippersnapper.