Euro helps UK EFL buck doom and gloom trend

Not all language schools in the UK are doing so well. This one, at 145 Oxford Street, London W1, appeared to be locked, with mail piling up in the doorway. A notice of eviction served by the property's owners, Prudential, was sellotaped to the door as of early March.


From EL Gazette, February 2009

Mario Rinvolucri, founder of Pilgrims School of English - in Canterbury in the South East of England - told that Gazette that Pilgrims’ own latest figures, and the intelligence he’s getting from across the UK EFL industry, show that ‘receipts are extremely good’ in the UK industry as a result of the record rise in the value of the Euro against the pound. Pilgrims has been picking up a lot of end of season executive courses from the Eurozone (the 15 EU states currently using the Euro currency) in a development which is bucking the general trend towards ‘doom and gloom’ in the recession-bound UK economy.

Mr Rinvolucri conceded that corporate clients were still on 2008 budgets, and it remains to be seen whether the 2009 budgets of corporations will maintain that level of spending in the current global economic climate. The success in recruiting from the Eurozone is also helped by the increasing use of ‘teacher agents, ’ according to Mr Rinvolucri. These are practising teachers in, for example, large comprehensive schools in Germany, who persuade some of their colleagues to come on Comenius courses, or teachers in private EFL schools that offer free taster courses for summer schools at Pilgrims. Teacher agents have all been on Pilgrims summer courses, and ‘are much more teachers and much less agents.’

Vietnam EFL 'out of control'

ENGLISH language schools in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC, formerly Saigon) are now proliferating so fast that its private English as a Foreign Language (EFL) sector is ‘out of control,’ according the English language Vietnam news website Vietnam Net Bridge. Nguyen Van Cuong, of the city’s Education and Training Department says that there are now 474 registered private EFL schools under its supervision, and that ‘the task of controlling the quality of English education centres in HCM City is quite a challenge.’

Setting up an ‘international centre’ teaching EFL under an ‘international’-sounding brand name is relatively cheap, and Mr Cuong said that it’s possible with an investment of as little as 2 million dong (£78) in a prime location. Opening another branch of an existing school requires much less bureaucracy than setting up a new school from scratch, so that most schools have two or three branches in the city, with some schools operating as many as 20 branches.

Operating multiple branches means that chain schools can send their existing teachers into several schools, rather than having to spend money on hiring new teachers. Students sign up in the expectation of being taught by ‘highly qualified native-speaking teachers’ only to find that these are often backpackers who are very thinly spread around many different branches of a school. One student complained to Vietnam Net Bridge that he had signed up on the promise of four days a week out of five, but now he gets to be taught by a native speaker only once a week.

Other sharp practices in Ho Chi Minh City’s mushrooming private EFL sector include frequent unsubstantiated claims that schools’ certification is internationally recognised. And complaints about false advertising go beyond claims about native-speaker teachers. One school projected a ‘luxurious appearance’ to a student, named as Minh Nghia,’ when he came to enquire about enrolling, but put that student in ‘small and stuffy’ classrooms. A staff member at the centre gave assurances that his class would have a maximum of 20 students, but the class turned out to have 30 students, with new students constantly added as they enrolled. "The class is too crowded and it’s really hard to listen to the teachers’ words,’ said Nghia.

A language centre director, speaking to Vietnam Net Bridge on condition of anonymity, said that ‘English centres owned by Vietnamese universities inside their campuses, which in the 1990s were very popular, and whose payments were only several 10,000 dong, (just under $4) can barely survive,’ as ‘low-cost English centres are now losing ground to the ones whose fees are in the millions of dong or even in US dollars,’ fuelled by a popular belief that teaching using a high proportion of native speaker teachers automatically translates into higher quality.

Own Brand of teaching

BRITAIN'S most controversial stand-up comedian Russell Brand is currently best known for a recent scandal involving a ‘prank’ phone call in which he left obscene phone messages on the answering machine of a well-known veteran actor. The incident forced his resignation from his BBC Radio 2 show and cost the jobs of several senior BBC executives. Brand’s lower profile in the US didn’t stop him putting a lot of backs up in a rare US appearance at the MTV Video Awards last September, where he taunted the celibate lifestyle of clean-cut teen pop act the Jonas Brothers (from High School Musical).

More of interest to Teflers though, is Brand’s recent revelation on his Russell Brand’s Ponderland TV show that he was previously an EFL teacher on London’s Oxford Street for a year. Using a four-letter scatological reference to describe the quality of his teaching, he admitted that he was the ‘cool, popular teacher’ who, following a time-honoured Oxford Street private EFL sector practice, would occasionally take his students for lessons in a nearby park on sunny days. When Brand started passing a ‘joint’ (marihuana cigarette) among his students, however, he was betrayed by ‘some evil student who actually wanted to learn English!’ The management came to question Brand’s class about this, and Brand recalled desperately preparing his class by getting them to collectively agree an alibi for him. This stratagem failed however, because in Brand’s own words, ‘I was such a s*** teacher that none of them understood me.’