Peterborough College: Part of the Inspire Education Group - Peterborough

Adam B.

It's a great college, for me anyways, the tutors have a great personality and very happy and encouraging. They have all the equipment you need for when you'd be doing it in real life and as a career.

cheeto S.

Im a first year student level 3, this college has been an absolute waste of time and i would rather have open heart surgery with no anaesthetic and then be run over by a truck whilst in surgery then ever come here again. I would reccomend this college to anyone who wants to go clinically insane. The amount of miscommunication and disorganisation is actually detrimental to our society in learning and growing. The shameless lack of respect for students time and effort is disgusting. It baffles me that these people are actually procreating, the absolute lack of knowledge that the staff have shown is uncanny.
I fear i have lost braincells and neurons during my time at this college, I have had lecturers LAUGH on call to me after wasting MY TIME (not in college hours) after realising that her name WAS NOT the same I had been calling her (she responded to that name for HALF AN HOUR.)

Marking and responding to emails is absolutely awful but as soon as anybody contacts you, you are expected to give up your arms and first born and respond within the first 5 minutes otherwise they will call and email you until you do.
If i could give this negative stars i would, please do NOT apply here, it seems that all courses have these issues and I am not the only one who has experienced this.
APPLY TO SIXTH FORM IM BEGGING YOU.

Hafsa D.

As a level 2 business student in my opinion I think the business course is great (unsure if it's good in other courses). The lecturer's are experienced and good at teaching the business topics. They are also quite nice if you don't annoy them. The tutor is very fair and nice in level 2 business (in my opinion) and the student mentor for level 2 business is also quite friendly and fair if you don't annoy her. The classes are good in my opinion for level 2 business and I would recommend people to do business as a course.

Anonymous U.

This college is a complete and utter waste of your time, money, and overall patience. I will explain exactly why below, but to summarize, this college cannot communicate between departments, and most of the courses are horribly managed.

To be more in depth, let's start with miscommunication. This college has an apparent issue with miscommunication - this is evident in the fact that half the time when there are any problems on a course, nobody knows what to do, and multiple answers are given in response. As an example of this, I'll specifically mention the time in my course where a part of an exam was ENTIRELY MISSED due to a miscommunication between the Exams team and my course's managers. Keep in mind, this exam was MANDATORY to pass the course. This led to us not getting a grade AT ALL for the 2nd part, and those that did not achieve a good enough grade for the 1st part were FORCED to re-sit the whole test, including the 1st part, a few months later. Unbelievable!

I wish the issues stopped there, but unfortunately not. Let's move onto the lecturers themselves. I can't speak on behalf of all courses, but I will speak about the experiences I faced during my time on the Computing course. There were a number of faculty issues during my time at this college - but it all started when we first began studying the course. Everything was fine up until we met one specific teacher, who I will not mention by name, but those who studied Computing will know them. This lecturer did not understand very simple concepts, and rather than having a passion or interest for the topic, would just sit and read off slides, unable to properly answer technically-related questions we had for them. This worsened when it came to assignments, but I will get into this later. This lecturer is STILL WORKING THERE to this day, despite having had multiple issues with grading assignments and multiple instances of taking long periods of sick leave, leaving students struggling with cover teachers.

Next, let's talk about the assignments. Now, the assignments by themselves are absolutely fine - the content makes sense, the criteria is pretty fair, however, the content taught in lectures compared to what is on the assignment is the issue. There were a couple of instances during my time on the course where we were given our assignment for the unit, and found that one or more of the criterias had not been covered at all by the lecturer. This meant that we had to independently learn what this meant in a short amount of time (depending on the assignment, we were given anywhere between 1 to 2 weeks to complete it, and these were not small assignments by any means). This was a major problem that was not fixed to my knowledge, and as far as I've been told is still happening to this day. Now, the other issue with assignments was marking. A lot of the lecturers on the course really struggled to give us proper feedback for our work. Most of the time, the comments we were given were very vague, not really constructive, and in the worst cases were just copy-pasted onto every single document, even though the comments didn't make sense! I will give credit where it's due; some lecturers were very thorough and fair with marking, giving proper feedback, but this was still an alarming problem that did not help matters.

Finally, this college will unashamedly lie to you. There was a change made in early/late 2022 where the college would close the gate on Eastfield Road. Originally, no explanation was given, however information was passed from the top down to the lecturers that this was due to the fact that members of the public were accessing the site and it was seen as a security risk. However, me and many other students disagreed with this: local businesses benefited a lot from PRC students, and we think that the college has done this in order to protect its profits.. interesting when you consider how much the cafeteria prices have gone up in the last year.

Don't waste your time here.

Alyssa P.

I’ve been at this college for a good while on the first year of lvl 3 animal course. It takes a lot of hard work to do the assignments to a good standard and there is a lot more assignments than you’d first think but they are manageable. Some of the subjects are easier to understand exams aren’t difficult if you put the work in. The only issue I have with the course is the work experience assignment if you are living in a more remote place finding experience placement is difficult and the assignment that goes along with it is definitely the longest out of all of them so it does feel like a drag. Break periods in the college tend to be chaotic and crowded especially with the food areas. Had a lot of things such as my PPE and bus paid for by college. Some students outside of my chosen course have been a bother but that’s just how people are. The health and well-being team are 50-50 some of the staff are super understanding sweet and just great while others I’ve found to be less caring. I’ve loved most of my course tutors and the animal care staff are a really sweet group along with the two PD teachers I’ve had. Lowered the rating to three stars as I believe other courses aren’t as good and I have had some issues with the college as previously stated. Would still recommend the animal course though.

Leanne

Bit of a mixed bag. I loved my personal development lessons ( had 2 great student mentors who went above and beyond to help me). The class I was in made up for some of the chaos. On the occasions I used the wellbeing centre, I had a pretty good experience and got on well with the staff. However the downsides, We were given the biggest asisgnments towards the end of the year or during half term, with less time to actually complete them with little guidance sonetimes. Lessons towards the end of the year were often cancelled and sometimes mixed with the other groups on our course.

Lou L.

Honestly, not a great school. I did a media course, and, don’t get me wrong, it was awesome. But, the courses aren’t the issues, the staff are. Most of the staff that I encountered were rude, and disrespectful. I would name drop, but that’ll just cause issues.

If the staff tried a little more on actually engaging the students and treating them with respect, I’m sure there would be nicer reviews.

But, with every bad member, there was a good member. I only ever had 6 staff members teach me, and of those 7, 4 were actually worth their salt. They went out of their way to help. 2 of the remaining 3 were ok, nothing special. They turned up to work, taught, and left.

But 1 teacher I never got on with. They were always rude and late and just generally unlikeable.

Angela J.

Job smart one staff member thinks you going to drop everything because they say so all so they didn't treat me very good in the pass.
I would like to know how come I bring in chocolate for a staff member I got in to trouble over it and someone else done same thing and they got away with it I think all foodshould be band