......I thought that there was an obligation on all training schools to provide access to NOTAM's ? I can't think of any briefing rooms that I've visited that hasn't had them pinned up on the noticeboard (ok, I haven't visited many flying schools!).
Well, yes, it's indeed pinned to the wall or somehow there. But since that printout has to include every airfield and FIR where a member might conceivably fly to that day, this is indeed the proverbial 50-page document full of PJEs and stuff. Not fun to read through. Even worse if your geographical knowledge isn't fully up to scratch (if you're a foreigner, say) and you have no idea where Nowhereshire is - you need to plot all lat/long coordinates on a map to see if there's anything that's relevant.
As others have said, there are websites that allow a narrow route briefing which greatly reduces the amount of NOTAMs. But if no instructor points this out to the students, how are they going to learn?
BTW am I the only one who thinks the Eurocontrol PIB interface is crap? You have a choice of the basic view, which is plain HTML and doesn't allow any filtering at all, or you have the advanced view which downloads a seriously big Java applet to do your filtering. It has a number of logical errors as well (it doesn't accept a "local" flight for instance, where DEP = DEST, and if you're not interested in either the snowtam or the ashtam it throws an error.) This in addition to opening at least three or so different browser windows/tabs and hiding the most obvious buttons somewhere in the text.