Send Clowns,
I do not have the flying school prices to hand, but will post them next week when I do. They are lower than many others, so there is no question of us having increased the flying costs to fund the lower ground school costs.
You are incorrect regarding what free retraining means. It is certainly true that we will allow students to sit in on existing lectures and provide whatever out-of-class advice they require. But it goes much further than that. If for example a student were to be particularly ungifted and fail a large proportion of the exams, he/she would be provided with an entire re-run of the relevant module. In the (more probable) scenario of a limited number of failures, students can attend pre-planned consolidation courses.
But the system goes further than this. Some students from other schools have failed to complete the 14 exams within the required 18 months and wish to start again. In some cases they are concerned that the usual groundschool schedules are too demanding and want to spread their training over a longer period. In such cases our free retraining can be interpreted as doing two sequences of ground school to complete one sitting of the 14 subjects. In each module the student attends only those subjects that they intend to sit in the next exams. The spare periods can then be spent in spare classrooms, doing extra work on the subjects they intend to take next. By doing extra work on each subject and studying less subjects at each stage, they will increase their prospects of success. This will of course take much longer to complete, but it means that they get training far in excess of the CAA minimum, without paying extra tuition fees. And 42 weeks of training for a little over £1680 is a good deal by anyone's standards.
Your school may or may not allow free attendance in classes, but many do not. In the past there was no legal requirement for students to do a fixed amount of retraining after failing to complete their exams. The CAA are about to introduce a legal minimum, plus a requirement that all exam requests, including resits are signed by an FTO. For students attending many of the schools this will inevitably mean paying more money to their school.
Your assertion that you have no vested interest is clearly untrue. There are only a limited number of students available and every one that attends another school will not attend yours. More significantly, why is it that you sished to spread the unfounded rumour that the EPTA price was for only one module, without bothering to check the facts? As you say, both schools are at bournemouth, so we are just around the corner! Is it not the case that you wanted the rumour to be believed, ragardless of the truth?
Gin Slinger,
Welcome to the EPTA. I had not realized that it was you.
You are partly correct in you statement that the discounted groundschool cost is a loss leader. But our approach goes much further than that. The FTO market is already rather crowded, so any new school that hopes to make money by simply doing more of the same, is unlikley to prosper. The EPTA intends to thrive and become a market leader by being inovative. The strictures of the CAA impose tight controls on many aspects of the operations of schools. But this does not make inovation impossible. It just requires a little bit more thouight.
The very low prices might well be temporary, but the free retraining and imaginitive appraoch to improving our services will be a permanent aspect of the way we operate.