There are types you might wish to be at 4,500 or rather higher for stalling, but to be fair, none of them I fly normally. If Dobbin needs 1500ft to recover from a stall in an SEP, then he might want to reconsider how he's teaching it, and 3000agl for recovery is a bit on the high side for most common training types isn't it?
A classic a few months ago, which I'm sure was quite legal. As a CRI I was teaching an exercise on measurement of climb and glide performance for a specialist course (before anybody asks, not on any PPL syllabus, and this all went up as far as EASA HQ and they approved it, also done within an ATO with the full approval of the Head of Training), to an aeronautical engineer who held a PPL. Cloudbase was about 1000ft, cloud tops about 3,000ft.
Took off, climbed into cloud, did the entire exercise between cloud tops and 8,000ft or so. Then took an approach back into base.
Within my licences and privileges. All logged as instruction. safe, chunks of it logged as IFR. But, of-course, I was not teaching any aspect of IF - I'm not qualified to, and he didn't need me to.
G