What has happened to Reading College and Activate Learning?
My first time at Reading College was back between 2017 and 2019 doing a Btec Science course. As I was really impressed with the college at the time, I though I'd return for the 23/24 academic year for a Btec Engineering course following a bad experience I had with another course I did at university. Although the first few weeks of the course went smoothly, it was after October half term where things started to go downhill quite quickly. Here's a summary of the things I experienced.
- As a mature student, I paid a good amount of money for the 1 year I'm back at Reading College. However, because I've missed so many lessons that have amounted to missing several weeks, I arranged a meeting with my faculty manager about getting a partial refund for these lessons I've missed. As he had to email the directors, I had to wait quite a few weeks to hear back, but to both of our disappointments, they DIDN'T refund me, and even my faculty manager said that if it was up to him, he would've given me all of the money I requested. As many other people have said, Activate Learning are clearly more worried about making a profit than giving their students the best experience possible.
- My next point is about one of my recent lessons, where I had an important meeting about my apprenticeship one morning, which I heard about back in March and would’ve been impossible to change. My timetable had been changed a few days before to an important lesson, so I emailed my lecturer regarding this, and he said that it would be fine for me to miss it, with me under the presumption that I’d be able to catch up. When I emailed him the following day about this, not only did he say that I wouldn’t be able to catch up as it was a teamwork based assignment, but he was also implying that I was at fault for prioritising my apprenticeship meeting that I had in the diary for over 3 months over this important lesson that was rescheduled only a few days prior. On top of this, he copied my tutor, faculty manager and other workshop lecturer into the email in an attempt to find an alternative solution to this problem. Again, this really annoyed me, as this rescheduling was out of my hands, and I felt I was tricked into thinking I'd be able to catch up.
- In my last 2 weeks at college, my timetable for my Btec class, including the week commencing the date I write this review, our timetable was rammed with early starts and late finishes (8-6 instead of 9-5) to catch up with missing lessons. This is an attempt to catch up with 6 assignments that we should've been doing for the few months prior, but those lessons were cancelled due to the T-Level coursework taking priority over ours. Overall, I feel like we've been treated like 2nd-class students that now have a mad rush to finish assignments through no fault of our own, whilst the T-Level students are now finished and now on summer holiday.
-On top of this, the T-Level students got a LOT more support than the Btec students. One important part of both courses is gaining work experience, of which it's compulsory for the T-Level students and optional for the Btec students. Whilst the T-Level students got help finding it, the Btec students just got a list of company websites to look at and were told to find it ourselves with minimum guidance and help. I know this is part of both of the courses specifications, but I feel like the T-Level lot get preferential treatment just because they're a more academic route.
Overall, I feel that this year at Reading College has been an absolute mess and disaster for students who are on the Btec route. I'm only giving a 2-star review as my first time at Reading College was excellent, but even that's being FAR TOO generous for what I've had this last academic year.
