Okay this is a... I was gonna say short rant but that's a lie...
This is a long rant about my experience with dive schools so brace yourselves!
I live in the UK and therefore dive with BSAC because it is the British Sub Aqua Club and also the most easily accessable one.
However. Easy doesn't always mean good, and while there's no doubt on earth that certain people at my club have impeccable skills, the actual people in charge of qualifiying me can be found rather lacking.
It took me 4 months to complete my first qualification which I did in 2023 - which in the grand scheme of things isn't too long but what you may not realise is:
4 months of doing the same skills once a week over and over in a pool 4 months before I would even be allowed NEAR open water 4 months of people trying to teach me 'their way' and 4 months of no one signing off my qualification book (signatures are required after every skill learnt, it's good practice for most Dive schools)
And even after all this I've just found that there were skills I was never taught, like how to breathe from a free-flowing regulator.
Then it came to my Sports Diver. Again, approximately 3-4 months of training in a pool (although in reality it was 70% theory lessons on dry land that covered lots of things, including practical skills like navigation and laying line, that I never got to practice in the pool before my official assesment) and then 3 dives in the sea. And that was August last year, and I still haven't been given my qualification.
Why?
Because "there were things I didn't teach you" ~ my instructor And "you didn't do your ascent very well" ~ my instructor And "You could redo it if you didn't work Saturdays" ~ my instructor
I like my instructor, she's a nice woman. However she did not do a good job and just because I like her doesn't mean I will excuse that. I won't take it any further however I hold no guilt with ditching the BSAC training for something better.
I am staying with my BSAC club because I have friends there, people I love to dive with week in and week out, around 60% of the divers in the pool swim around like goldfish whereas me and my dive partners get up to crazy antics like taking off all our kit 4m underwater, removing and swapping over our masks, blowing bubble rings, playing underwater chess, diving with blindfolds on to simulate no visability or night dives.
However I am now doing Sports Diver with RAID (or - their equivilent of Sports Diver which is Advanced 35 (thus named because my max depth is 35m/114 foot))
My dive club has divers who I look up to, world class divers who have given me skills that I value and will never forget, if it weren't for them I'd still be kneeling on the bottom of the pool attempting to clear my mask when it gets flooded, but they weren't my instructors and they weren't the ones in charge of qualifying me, if they were perhaps this would be different.
I dived with the man who will soon be training me in Advanced 35, he said he has no idea, based off of 2 dives I did in an excavated Quarry yesterday, why I'm not a certified Sports Diver. He said I should be on my way to being Dive Leader qualified. That isn't praise to be taken lightly, especially not from someone who only gives it where it's due.
Choose your dive school carefully. Weigh up what matters most. I won't be leaving the BSAC club however I will be retraining with RAID. I value my safety and having confidence in myself, over whether my old instructors are offended that I got tired of waiting for them to teach me.