the training had been conducted by different hour hungry junior grade 3 instructors who did not put these students up for regular senior checks and would just fly with them doing session after session of ccts, wondering why they were taking so long.
First of all, thanks for all the thoughtful and very helpful replies. Please keep them coming because I know for sure there are many instructors who read Pprune and although they may not post, nevertheless gain much experience from what they read here.
Of course we will never know the numbers but the point made in the above highlighted paragraph is true. I recall one instructor who flew huge circuits in a 150 in order to (in his own words) allow the student time to settle down. The student was a 15 year old school boy whose parents were happy to pay lots of money for flying lessons not realising the boy could not solo until he turned 16. So his instructor (now an airline captain) flogged the circuit with the kid logging well over 30 hours even though he may have been perfectly capable of going solo in terms of skill.
On another occasion a young woman came to our flying school with over 60 hours of dual. We asked the flying school who had flogged her, for a copy of her progress reports and were initially ignored. A threat to tell CASA finally elicitated a copy of her flying hours but no instructor comments which of course was useless.
On another occasion we had the same problem getting a students progress reports from yet another flying school (student had 25 hours and no solo) and when they arrived the instructors written comments were one liners such as "Mary did better this time" (after 1.1 hours of dual) - or: "Mary- you must check all clear left, centre and right when you do turns" (this after 1.5 hours and that was the only entry in the students sheet. The instructor clearly lack education and had no idea how to describe a students problem. Obviously his instructors course failed to include lectures on the purpose of student records and how to write common sense reports. Of course the CFI should have insisted on a higher standard of report writing, but chances are the CFI never bothered to review his instructors student records for QA purposes.
With some students being given three or four different instructors in the first ten hours of flying lessons and progress reports lacking in a standard hardly beyond primary school English expression, is it any wonder students' flying instruction is a often rip-off. A recent arrival at our flying school revealed she had been taught to "pick up the wing with rudder" in terms of stall wing a wing drop. Pressed to explain, she said the technique taught at her previous school was to push hard on the rudder to skid the 150 around the horizon until the lowered wing gained enough lift to be level. CASA insistence that future grade 3 applicants be tested by a specialised ATO team seemed perfectly justified.