Originally Posted by
G-VCED
I did visit Sherwood Flying School at Nottingham and spent close to 45 minutes talking to the CFI, who was a friendly and knowledgeable chap. I did get a good vibe from the school. I have visited others where I didn't get as good impression.
Just finished my PPL at a school with quite a high turnover of instructors. From that experience my view is that the vibe and relationship with instructors is absolutely crucial to good learning, so if you have found a place where you like that, my opinion would be to go for it.
On your original question about ATC experience I learnt at an airfield with Air/Ground only. I actually think it helped me with situational awareness to be solely responsible for my own movements...you realise very quickly you just can't get away with poor lookout/awareness when there's noone else there monitoring you on a radar screen. I found it easy to make the change to dealing with full ATC and hopefully still keep my good awareness habits. Not sure the transition would have been so easy the other way around.
Good luck :-)