App220,
I doubt that anyone puts Oxford down "due to the fact that it wasn't for them," - why single Oxford out when there are so many other schools which also weren't "for them"? The only reason I can find why some people put Oxford down is because a very small number of their students believe that Oxford is infinitely superior to all other schools, that every ATPL student and recruitment department must bow down to them, and that the world owes them a job because they went to Oxford. If you're not one of that small minority, then I apologise - but from your earlier post, it sounded as if you were.
Since you ask (and it's hardly a secret anyway - I've discussed it dozens of times on other threads), I'm currently doing distance learning with Bristol. Distance learning because I need to stay in full-time work in my current job in order to pay the bills. After looking at every school which offered a distance learning course, I narrowed it down to Oxford, LGU or Bristol. I initially included LGU in the shortlist because they offered a brush-up course which was half the length of the other schools', but ruled them out party because I felt that, if it were possible to do the brush-up properly in such a short space of time, other schools would offer that option too, and partly because LGU didn't have anything which made it stand out from the crowd apart from that one thing.
That left Bristol or Oxford. I would have been very happy with either, but chose Bristol over Oxford for a number of reasons: Their notes appeared, to me, to be better quality than Oxford (easier to understand and learn from), although not by much. They also stated, in their standard information package, that the quality of the notes is by far the most important thing - something which I agree with - and included a sample of their notes for that reason. (They were the only school to do this - others invited me to visit and look at notes, but didn't incldue a sample even when I asked for one, and certainly didn't include one as standard.) The third reason was the interactive CD - a lot of the material on the CD is very gimmicky, but there's some really useful stuff too. Oxford took a little longer to reply to my queries than almost every other school, which is a bad thing, particularly for distance learning. (I have since heard that their admin department have a bit of a reputation in this respect, which is not mirrored by their training... and I haven't heard that for a while, so maybe they've improved since then?) And finally, I had some recommendations for Bristol from people in the industry who I trust. In all these aspects, Oxford scored well, but Bristol scored better, for me.
From what I've seen (and I haven't investigated very thoroughly, because it's not an option that I would have been able to follow through), Oxford would have been my school of choice for a residential course. I'm currently looking at options for the CPL course, and even at the early stage of investigation, Oxford are already filtering through to the top of the list.
FFF
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