It depends!
Your training provider location depends on whether you are planning to attend taught courses, i.e. in a classroom for evening classes, day release or block release courses, or if you want to study by distance learning / on-line learning.
Taught courses
Clearly, you won’t want to travel too far, so yes, – for taught courses, it does matter where your training provider location is. This will be more relevant if you want to attend evening classes. For day release courses, you will have bit more time to get to the training provider/college. For block release courses, you may want to consider staying away in order to attend the provider of your choice.
However, normally you will want a training provider location that is easily accessible. You don’t want to get there exhausted, or late. Travel costs can also be a factor.
In order to find a college/training provider location near you, you can search using the AAT’s “Find a Training Provider” site here
The site will ask you for your Method of Study:
- Classroom or
- Distance / Online
Enter your postcode and/or town name and the qualification you are interested in and click “Find Providers” and it will come up with a list of those providers closest to your location. When you click on their entry, you will see details of their courses and their contact details.
NB: watch out though!
The AAT sell Promoted banners, so that those providers who pay them can display their promotional banners at the top of the list of providers. There are about a dozen such providers and the AAT rotate them, only showing three Promoted centres at a time. These may not be anywhere near you. When I used the site (when writing this article), the three I saw were all based in London – not much use to me given I had given my location as Exeter – over 150 miles away!!!
When I scrolled down the page, below the promoted banners, I was able to see the centres closest to me.
Distance Learning courses
No – we don’t believe that it matters at all where your training provider location is. The clue is in the name…… “distance learning”!
Contact between you and the training provider / personal tutor can be by phone, email, Skype, Zoom or any other communication channel that you agree on. We have distance learning students all around the UK and have even had them in Gibraltar, Germany and Canada – with both of these we made full use if Skype. One of the benefits of Skype or FaceTime is that you don’t end up with big phone bills.
You can search for distance learning training providers on the AAT website here (as per above), but this time clicking your Method of Study as Distance / Online.
The slightly bizarre thing here is that the AAT insist that you still enter your postcode or location. We really don’t know why! What this means though is that:
- You will first see the promotional banners of three of the Promoted centres,
and if you scroll down - You will see the distance learning providers closest to where you live
To see the full list of providers and get a full choice you will have to keep scrolling. This still won’t show you all of them. You will probably need to get to the bottom of the page and click on “load more”, which is a bit of a pain.
…….hence we have felt obliged to pay to be a Promoted Centre, so you will probably see our promoted centre banner if you access the site enough times. Because we are based in Exeter and you may well be based well outside of the South West of England and miles and miles from us, when you enter your post-code it is more than likely that you won’t get to see our “normal” entry on the site, without scrolling down to the bottom of the page and then clicking “load more”. And the chances of most prospective students having the energy or time to do this are very slim! Hence we pay for the Promoted banner. Mutter, mutter!?!
However, we would encourage you to have a good look at all the providers there, and get details from a selection of them – including us of course! The link on the sites will allow you to request information, but do follow the links to the individual websites of the providers in order to get a feel for them, their services and most importantly their “personality”. Have a look the Team pages on the website to see the background of the staff and the qualifications, experience and technical know-how of the tutors.
