Farnborough College of Technology - Farnborough

Graham P.

I have found every aspect of the college from its open evening to its current working practices to be of a shambolic, inept and unprofessional nature.
Additionally there is an almost total lack of communication including lengthy delays and, eventually, poor responses sending out mixed messages.
The college has shown very little support in general. You know when the principal calls themselves a CEO something is wrong. Avoid at all costs if at all possible!

K̷ ?.

Got tested for autism, results came back positive, kicked out couple days later 👍 Also if you need extra support with mental health don’t bother, u get booted off if u ask. Happened to friend with ADHD kicked out too, very hard working girl but kicked out after asking for support.

Mike H.

I'm writing to express some concerns I have regarding my progress in Level 1 maths. I appreciate the efforts you put into teaching and supporting us. However I am not really getting any support and I have a ehp

Lucas K.

After spending 2 years here I have realised that this is the most disorganised college, teachers say they’re going to do one thing then go ghost, half the teachers don’t even know that they’re supposed to be teaching us and we’ve got a new teacher every month

Luke R. S. S.

I was chilling on lunch break when a teacher came up to me and said please take your hat off it's against the rules when other people are wearing hats and wasn't told to take it off I hate this college more than the Jake paul fight I am so done

Phoenix

This college is disappointing.

I was doing a course called "Pathways to Independence" for 2 years and during the time there, I have witnessed a freight amount of claptrap going around.

First things first; my friend, who has dyslexia and an impaired vision, has not received as much support. That one time, she requested a teacher to receive a larger copy of the worksheet for her to see properly, but got rejected. As of now, I'm glad this had turned around.

That one day (on 1st December 2022), one of our teachers were crying because we "ignored her." We cannot help nor control our deep voices. She threatened to keep us in a classroom for an additional 15-30 minutes if were are a single SECOND late after break, and this wasn't an exaggeration.

I have a moderate case of ADHD, meaning it's not entirely easy to concentrate in lessons. At the end of the lesson, I got pulled in and got told off because I didn't pay enough attention to people who are presenting their work, as if another student wasn't looking out the window, didn't give a rats ass and got away, scot-free. This is plain discrimination and absolutely toxic, especially that they know I'm suffering the condition but is looking for an excuse to have a go at us.

This is all disheartening and appalling. They really need to get their act up, post-haste.

(Additional review as of 29th March 2023)

A brawl broke out between me and one of my classmates today. But this isn't the main issue. Apparently, I have gotten into as much trouble as the attacker for doing the right thing. A teacher had a go at me over me reminding him "to not attack anybody" as he said he would, advising him to step away from risking being kicked off the college, also was absolutely rude to when the witnesses wrote what happened. We don't have the best grammar and apparently what we wrote were "articles for the sun" and "exaggerated". I sometimes think, it's not just the college.

I give my deep condolences to both students and ex-students who had to deal with ridiculous situations with these teachers. I am currently anticipating an improvement to go around.

The security department; you may think they are a good role in terms of security, and that is factual. But not until they got me falsely accused for writing "inappropriate" stuff on the board outside, when all I've written was "yo." Yes, we were caught by the CCTV but we only wrote silly items. There were swear words on the board and me and my friend have gotten the blame for it. I tried explaining exactly that and they put words in my mouth by saying that I wasn't doing anything. There were more than 40 students who have written on the board and we got the blame out of it.

Most of the staff are lacking commiseration (and dodging even the utmost suggestions from other perspectives that could improve the college) and instead just do whatever they can to feel confident about themselves, all for the sake of making money.

Do better.

K

DONT GO TO THIS COLLEGE. (If I could give 0 stars I would)
Don’t make the same mistake I did by going here.

I do ALevels and it is the worst decision coming to this college I ever made.
My first year of college my class missed out on having a teacher for the first 4 months so when we had our first exam in January no one knew what to do and we just had to wing the exam as much as we could and most people failed. We then finally got a teacher to try teach us 3/4 classes we should’ve had a week.

My philosophy class was the worst because our teacher left the first month of college to move back to his country for medical reasons and since then we were given 7 different teachers and none of them taught us anything before leaving us after a week. Because of the amount of teachers we had we were unable to take an AS exam which took grades away from us for the colleges fault but now unis won’t accept us because of these circumstances. In second year we were told we had to take a different subject and weren’t given a choice on what we could take and now are all struggling with our ALevels.

The college is disgusting when it comes to mental health. They say they’re big on mental health and do everything they can with their students but when you go to talk to someone they tell you they can’t talk to you for at least a week. How can you make someone with a low mental health wait to talk

The college also has a great problem with attacks outside the college gate with many students. A few of my friends included as victims in this where they have been ran upto by men just outside the college and thankfully got out safely but the college doesn’t seem to take matters into their own hands anymore making it anyone’s problem but their own making many students feel unsafe just walking up to the college.

The college also threaten students for their attendance. I attended college almost 100% of the time except when I’m ill my mum would call me in sick so they had a reason and I would get messages from the college telling me I’ll get kicked out if my attendance got any lower telling me I wasn’t allowed to miss any days even if I was sick.

There’s so much more I could say about this college that has ruined my chances of passing my exams and many other students feel this way too, every subject has gone through horrible things because of how bad the college is and when OFSTED visit the college becomes so fake kicking out bad students and pretending to teach a lesson. In my opinion this college shouldn’t even be around anymore especially with all the other reviews I have seen now, I didn’t realise it was a further problem in BTEC subjects too but as I’ve seen it is it’s AWFUL. how the college still ruins students chances. I’ve seen teachers make students cry. And straight A students get Ds this is unacceptable the college pushes you down. Go to Farnborough Sixth.

A

(My original review was supposed to be way longer but Google wouldn't let me exceed the character limit so some parts may not make quite as much sense).

For any Year 11/prospective Year 12 students reading this, please DO NOT go to this school if you value your future and your mental well-being.

I am a former A-Level student of Farnborough Tech and as such my experiences of this school may vary compared to students who take other courses (e.g - I can't speak for the experiences of BTEC or Access to Higher Education students), so the information I mention will mainly focus on my A-Level course experience.

My issues with the school:

- The introduction of career pathways. I was one of the first students to start this "career-pathway" learning and it's been a fairly mixed bag in my opinion.

- School times were irregular. It's standard to expect sixth forms to have many free periods for revision and other activities but the distribution of lesson periods is absolutely irritating. On one side, you'd have around 2 to 3 periods of lessons at varied times depending on the day but on the other side of the spectrum, you'd get a full day of lessons starting from 9 AM and ending at 5 PM (where some subjects would even be repeated!)

- Unreliability of teaching and the quality of lessons. *Some* of the teachers I had were reliable, but for the few decent teachers I've had, there have been very unpleasant experiences regarding the quality of teaching and availability of teachers. I can list at least a few at the top of my head:

• No teacher was present for the first 8 weeks of school term. (This issue applies to both students who took the Medical Science and Social Sciences pathways.) Luckily, this issue was resolved by the end of the first few months but it's not ideal for further-education students to be deprived of their education for MONTHS.

• The philosophy students cycled through 4 teachers total throughout the whole school year.

• The law teacher my class had was absolutely dreadful at teaching us anything relevant to law:
The majority of our lessons were done on Microsoft Word (and I mean the teacher just put up MS Word on the interactive board and wrote up random vaguely legal junk to pass off as a "lesson").

The few PowerPoints made for our class had SO MANY grammar mistakes and the information put on there was sometimes even ripped out of our textbooks word-for-word with no thought to reword or simplify the content for us.

- Students are incredibly miserable and sometimes even incredibly rude to others. Due to the low GCSE grades needed to take A Levels, this attracts students who aren't really keen on aiming for top grades. By itself, it'd be fine if students were just average but the way these students act towards other classmates is absolutely abysmal. At the start of the year, these students would push around others without any concern, would actively disrupt the class by throwing objects around the room and some even took pictures of other students without their consent in lessons and made fun of them online.

The worst part about it is that despite receiving news about these certain students, the school has refused to take any valuable action against them other than a warning.

And even ignoring these types of students, most of the people on these courses are absolutely genuinely miserable people who are (to put it kindly) a pain to talk to or deal with. It puts a damper on your mental health when having to deal with people who seem so down most of the time.

- Low grade attainment. A lovely website called "The Good Schools Guide" (which I'd highly recommend to compare colleges), shows the A Level grades from FCOT students. Sixth forms around the college have a range of grades mainly ranging from Cs to A*s, however the highest grade attained by FCOT students is a B. And that's not even mentioning the high amount of students that achieve Es to Ds, which is WAY higher than the national average.