By the Ofsted inspection of 2015 where they assessed the school to be good, school was 30% empty, with only 333 spaces filled and only 105 in the sixth-form.[6]
After the UTC had been open seven years. the numbers on roll has fallen to 230. Ofsted visited and declared that the school required improvement in every category. It was constrained by its structure and many of the pupils were sent here after they had failed elsewhere.[7] The 2018 Ofsted report included the following assessment:
Pupils do not achieve as well as they should in key stage 4, because the quality of teaching is too inconsistent. Pupils' standards of literacy are low and too many are inarticulate. Pupils do not achieve as well as they should. Teachers do not differentiate the pupils of different abilities: some pupils find work too easy, while others get set tasks that are too difficult for them. Leaders have not been able to retain staff,as a result,pupils' progress is halted in some subjects. The Governors' focus is not on raising the quality of teaching and pupils’achievement. In the sixth form students do not finish the courses that they start on. Attendance in the sixth form is not acceptable preventing progress. The school is small.The leadership team is small and some are inexperienced. Too many pupils do not have positive attitudes to learning. They take little pride in their work and disrupt the learning of others, especially when the quality of teaching is weaker.[7]
The UTC was formally merged with the neighbouring Abbeywood Community School in September 2022,[8] with Abbeywood occupying the former BTE Academy buildings.