Underwater Centre in Fort William achieves quality accreditation
The Underwater Centre in Fort William has become the first provider of subsea training to be given a prestigious seal of approval from a national quality assurance organisation.
The Centre, which delivers a range of courses in commercial diving and Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), has been accredited by the British Accreditation Council (BAC), which oversees the quality of independent further and higher education in the UK.
This BAC approval is a significant achievement for the Centre as the Council’s accreditation is recognised globally as the highest mark of educational quality in the private sector.
It is also a boost to the Centre’s thriving international recruitment market as visas are now only issued to overseas students at accredited institutions. In 2008, the Centre attracted more than 100 overseas students from countries across the globe including India, South Africa, Canada and the USA.
The Underwater Centre is the only training centre in the world that offers the full range of Health and Safety Executive (HSE) commercial diving qualifications in air and mixed gas diver training, from HSE scuba to HSE approved closed bell diving.
Its in-depth seven week training programme for ROV pilots comprises a four week electronics module and three weeks working ‘hands on’ with the Centre’s fleet of remotely operated vehicles.
As part of the stringent process for gaining accreditation, The Underwater Centre provided around 400 pages of documentation, including student manuals, various policies and course notes. This was followed by a comprehensive audit when BAC staff visited the Centre to see the facilities and courses first hand.
Steve Ham, General Manager of The Underwater Centre, said gaining the accreditation is an important step forward for the Centre.
“This announcement is not only great news for us, it’s great news for our students and the industry in general. We see our achieving the standards set out by the British Accreditation Council as being recognition of the work we are doing to make our diving and ROV courses world class.
“The opportunities this has created for us, both within The Underwater Centre and beyond, means that accreditation is the catalyst for further development of every aspect of how The Underwater Centre works.”
The Underwater Centre is based on the shores of Loch Linnhe which is in parts deeper than the North Sea. It is at the base of Ben Nevis which is sheltered so training and diving can take place virtually all year round.
As well as the seawater dive site with a large range of underwater structures and facilities, The Underwater Centre has an enclosed dive training pool, purpose built welding bays, private pier, three barges with wet bell and closed bell training facilities, fully equipped lecture rooms and accommodation for up to 49 students.
This diving school is a joke !
Did my sat course there last year after ten years of air diving. On the first bell run both hats failed in the water . Later on in the week the bailout bottle dropped out of the jacket as jacket was rotting away due to lack of maintance.
The accomadation is small and cramped and had damp in it. We had a guy put in our room off another course who had been moved out of four previous rooms due to his snoring which was unbeliuveable.
There is no hot food at the weekend but you still pay the same price for every day you are there ! We finished two days early but were refused our accomadation money back .
The teaching was lacking direction if you did not understand anything to do with the pyhsics you were told to read your notes. The slides were never on the screen for more than thirty seconds and when you complained you were shot down with put downs about how it’s not the done thing to complain and you will not make it offshore or it was different in their day.
Come the final exam we sat down only to find out they had onlly printed half of the exam paper.
As for the price each year it goes up by thirty percent I paid £10750 but there were guys on my course who paid over £14000.
This is just an opinon but look at your options !!!!!!!!!!!!
i agree withe the comment above,all the management at the centre care about is quantity not quality,ur just buying ur ticket no matter how shit u are in the water. we lost 13 hours in one week with equipment failure,had to do a weekend cos they fucked the schedual up. the welding and burining course is a complete rip off and they dont keep to there promis of helping people find work. u cant upload ur C.V in the centre so if companys did ask for it u couldnt send it. the course ahead of me paid 2500 to do the welding/burning course and only got in the water 3times in to weeks. they are shitting all over there aclaimed good reputation
Mark,
I agree with your comments but… get your spellings right before you post anything in future! It just doesn’t add any credibility to what you may have written!
Sorry mate! Mind you… Steve same aplies to you!
A crash course in English language would have been a lot cheaper for you lot!
Hi Mark,
My name is Dougie Ormiston, I work at The Underwater Centre.
I have looked into your comments relating to the incident involving hat failures . I have been unable to find any report relating to multiple hat failure other than an instance where we had a loss of comms. Loss of comms is not uncommon throughout all commercial diving operations and there are set procedures for when this occurs. Loss of comms can be the result of any part of the comms system failing. The helmets we use for both the shallow and deep dives on the sat. course are only used for these dives and are inspected and checked prior to every use. A high proportion of our Kirby Morgan hats are less than 3 years old and our on-site dive technicians maintain them scrupulously.
I’ve raised your comment regarding the claim you make about the bail out. I’ve spoken to the manager responsible for the jackets and he’s confirmed that there were a couple of instances where the bail out came loose, but these weren’t down to a lack of maintenance, but a result of substandard design. We have recently changed our supplier of jackets to a system that is much more reliable.
Our accommodation isn’t like staying in a five star hotel. The accommodation is not unlike what you’ll find on a large number of jobs and is far better than many we hear about. All of the rooms are now part of our planned maintenance programme and are being refitted. Much of this work involves putting new plumbing, bathroom and shower facilities into the rooms, especially those where we think that there were issues with the previous owners’ installation and maintenance.
We’ve taken on more kitchen staff and now provide dinner for our students at the weekends, at no additional cost. We do get a lot of positive feedback about the food we serve to our students.
Your comments regarding the lectures and specifically, the overheads, have been highlighted to the diver training manager. As part of The British Accreditation Council’s inspection, they sat in on a number of classes. We did receive very good feedback from BAC about our teaching methods. It is true that if there are some topics you are finding challenging in class that you are asked to read up on it further using our course notes., if you’re still having problems, the instructors will often spend time going over things at the end of the day. Our very high pass rate seems to suggest that our teaching works, although admittedly the subjects can be challenging at times. We are always open to receiving feedback on particular lecturers’ teaching style and we use the feedback forms given to students at the end of every course to continue to refine and improve our courses.
I have raised the issue of the incomplete exam papers with the appropriate managers. Please accept my sincerest apologies for this oversight. We want every aspect of the training we provide to be as good as it can be, so people like you taking the time to highlight where we’re going wrong helps us make things better. Over the past three years, significant investment has been made in numerous different aspects of what we do. We’ve installed new equipment, recruited more staff and installed new cabins on the pier to name but a few of the changes that have and are continuing to go on here.
Pretty much every penny of profit since the new management took over in 2004 has been re-invested into the centre and a recent audit by the HSE has highlighted the massive improvements we have made here over the last 5 years. We continue to invest but we don’t have a bottomless pit of money so we have to prioritise what items give the most benefit to students.
Regarding putting prices up, we are affected by the same rise in costs that the whole offshore industry has experienced over the last few years. If we don’t make some profit we cannot reinvest in our equipment and continue to make improvements for students. If you compare prices over the past 3 years, the increase appears large, but if you compare the current price to the price of ten years ago, in relative terms, there is very little difference between what it is now to then. You should perhaps look at the prices that other schools are quoting for 2010 – you’ll see that we are competitive. And we do not go up by 30% each year.
Every student is given the opportunity to provide feedback on their course. When the British Accreditation Council inspected The Underwater Centre, they commented that our procedures for recording student feedback and using it to identify areas for improvement were as thorough as any they’d ever seen. The proof of this is in the improvements that have occurred since you did your course. We will continue to be audited by the British Accreditation Council – is any other school out there willing to take on that level of auditing by a well respected national educational organisation.
I hope this answers the specific issues you’ve raised. Hopefully, I’ve been able to show you that things are moving forward and continuing to improve – we are committed to making The Underwater Centre the best it is possible for it to be.
Hi Steve,
The Underwater Centre is committed to offering the best training to our students. We’re all in favour of anyone having an opinion about The Underwater Centre and having the freedom to voice that opinion. If you have a constructive criticism of The Underwater Centre to make, then that’s fine, make it, and we’ll investigate it and, where possible, try and improve things. Your suggestion that The Underwater Centre is ignoring the standards set by the HSE is completely inappropriate. I’m committed to making The Underwater Centre the absolute best it can be, it’s not perfect at the moment, but it’s a world apart from where it was two years ago, and in two years time, it’ll be better than it is today. Tell us why you think the welding and burning course is a rip off and what we can do improve it, otherwise you’re just calling us names.
To answer some of your points:
We do deliver quality training and follow HSE guidelines closely. Classes can be delayed by a number of things – occasionally equipment problems, sometimes weather but more usually it’s because of student’s missing dives due to illness or students taking longer than planned to reach specific standards. In those cases we always aim to finish courses on time, and if that means we come in at the weekend to do that then that’s what our staff are committed to doing.
In terms of providing you with help to find jobs, students have access to the neighbouring college where online modules are offered in, for example, CV preparation and presentation techniques. When we receive requests from companies looking for divers, we post them on our notice board. But approaching companies is predominantly down to our students – a student’s determination will dictate how successful he or she is in getting a job.
One of the specific issues you raised relates to internet access. There have been problems with this, but the simple fact of the matter is that the problems with internet access are solely the result of some students utilising all of the available bandwidth to download files from the internet. We have stopped students streaming data and have an agreement in place with the Lochaber College which means TUC students can use their library and IT facilities as well as our own. We are evaluating the cost of creating further IT infrastructure to deliver additional bandwidth and will be looking to implement this in the near future.
These solutions have improved the situation, but short of searching students for proxy devices, there is little more we can do to stop people hogging bandwidth at the expense of their fellow students and impeding their efforts to send off their C.V.s to prospective employers.
I can honestly say that we have our students’ interests at heart and we will continue to deliver diving courses to a high standard that will help our students develop their career in the subsea industry. If there are issues that arise for particular students during their course, we will always try to resolve things for them while they are here – it’s pretty difficult to do that if we only hear of a student’s complaints long after their course has finished.
A fellow student at a recent Diver Medic course was a sat diver doing his refresher DMT.
He had gone to Underwater Centre for his sat course and told us it was complete shite, very unprofessional and the last place to ever get your sat ticket.
His complaints centered around ancient gear that often failed, from hats to tools, and instructor absenteeism – the lot.
He was also very bitter about how an instructor just failed to show up one day and no replacements were offered. An entire wasted day for the whole class.
I forget the exact numbers he used, but it went something like this: “think about it, if you have twelve students each paying around a thousand dollars a day to attend the course, that professor is robbing the lot of about $12,000 whilst on the piss at a nearby bar – the lack of respect !”
He was venomous and nonstop about it one day on the way back from class.
I see the staff above trying to excuse the problems based on not hearing student complaints until after the students have left. They weren’t notified, how could they fix it?
And “Every student is given the opportunity to provide feedback on their course. ”
How kind of the school to accept input from the students – what a luxury.
Do you see the attitude here?
That is classic “reactive management” style of the worst sort.
“we can’t fix it if you don’t tell us !” Yeah, actually, you can, if you CHECK it.
You prevent in-service problems by doing intensive pre-class checks on everything from BCs to hats to grinders – everything – to make sure the 360,000 pound course you’re launching goes off without dangerous equipment failures.
If you’re going to talk the talk of being a 5-star school, you have to walk the walk of being truly 5-star.
At a Four Seasons hotel, when a glass tabletop in the lobby gets chipped, what do they do? Do they put some masking tape on the chipped part, call the glass shop to order a new one, and replace it when the new one comes in?
No, that’s bush-league and any monkey could do that. That’s not five-star.
Four Seasons keeps replacement glass tabletops in storage at the hotel and they swap them out in minutes flat. *That* is five-star. Hot spares to guarantee a flawless experience.
When you have a dozen students standing around at $1,000 a day, you should have new grinders, BCs, as hot spares still new in-box.
And, yes, you must have extra instructors on standby when yours fail to show up. To not rob the students of a collective $12,000 and twelve days of their life.
If you’re going to brag about quality and command top dollar, you can’t have class delays due to broken gear needing to be fixed.
Rather than having your staff spend a day typing up an elaborate rebuttal, buy some hot spares for critical gear and beef up your Failure Prevention Team.
You can rebut all day long but remember – there are a lot more of us than there are of your rebuttal staff and word gets around. It’s not like it’s one isolated report.