Avoid paying too much money up front. Here is the reason.
About 20 years or so ago a quite prominent training outfit in Kent. when on their backs, legs up. I heard from a very reliable source, one week before this happened, a chap handed over £60,000 for his son to get a license. That was the last he saw of it. They must have known this was about to happen but they still took the poor guys money!
If that had been me I would have tracked down the money people there and would probably have swung for them.