Page 31 - ELG2009 Sep Issue 472

UK RANKINGS 2020-21 . UK LANGUAGE CENTRES

Should we put teaching first?

Centres of Excellence score well in a
range of areas but when it comes to EC OXFORD

teachers’ qualifications half of adult
courses would fail accreditation in
other English-speaking countries,

Melanie Butler reveals

t is obvious why we need to differentiate between centres of
excellence with the same scores when seven per cent of all UK
accredited language centres have been awarded ten areas of
Istrength, out of fifteen, by British Council Inspectors.
Clearly, we also need to focus on different aspects when it comes to
differentiating centres for over-16s, as opposed to schools dealing
primarily with children. For adult courses, we use Teaching and EC Oxford is the highest-scoring international chain school
Learning as the area of differentiation.
Why? Because for most adult learners, the need for progress is inspection—the highest-scoring international chain school is EC
generally urgent, in order to pass an exam, get a job or get into a Oxford, with 4.3 bonus points.
university. Ideally, we would measure average student progress as they The Teaching and Learning scores in the private sector are fairly well
do in New Zealand but—as they found there—it is hard to measure correlated to the actual percentile ranking of the schools in terms of
language progress when students stay less than ten weeks. The British their overall number of areas of strength.
Council do not have a progress metric, but then the average adult The better-ranked the private language school, the better the
stays in the UK just over five weeks. teaching and learning. This is not necessarily the case with the state
So, we use the six areas inspected under the heading Teaching and sector, though if you insist on graduate teachers, and you don’t want
Learning as a proxy. As we explain on page 24, we do this by delving to check our rankings, then state is your safest bet.
into the details in the centre’s full report, and awarding bonus points
based on the inspectors’ score on individual criteria.
However, for adult centres, we also award a small bonus if all
teachers have the level of education – first degree or equivalent, a
Level 6 qualification in the UK terms, as the Council ‘generally’
requires.

To achieve accreditation in the
US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia
and Ireland all teachers must be The Language
Centre
graduates—end of story.

To achieve accreditation in the US, Canada, New Zealand,
Australia and Ireland all teachers must be graduates—end of story. To
work in a British Council teaching centre overseas, experienced non-
graduate teachers must have a 12 week EFL diploma, a Level 8
qualification, which also makes you fully-qualified or TEFLQ under MA Teaching English to Speakers
their accreditation rules. of Other Languages (TESOL)
But in the UK, 43 per cent of Centres of Excellence have at least
one teacher who is neither a graduate nor fully-qualified. That rises to 1 year full-time, 2 years part-time
57 per cent in private language schools. Yet only three of these centres Available from September 2020
are judged by inspectors not to have met the criteria; all had 25 per
cent or more non-graduate teachers. This UK-based Masters degree will develop existing skills to enable you to teach
In the state sector, six out of 31 had non-graduates, and they are English to speakers of other languages around the world and to contribute to the
separately ranked (see opposite page). Across the board, the state changing world of international English language education.

sector is consistently stronger in Teaching and Learning, with 90 per For more information and details on entry requirements, please contact
cent obtaining an area of strength in classroom observation, compared The Language Centre on 01695 657188, email efl@edgehill.ac.uk
to 60 per cent in the private sector. or visit our website at: ehu.ac.uk/tesol
Although, if you turn to page 32, you will see that on average, the
top 20 private language schools beat the state sector in terms of total
bonus points, with five private schools scoring five or more out of six,
compared to just one state sector provider. The international chains
tend to do worse at Teaching and Learning than in other elements of search Edge HIll

30 September 2020 editorial@elgazette.com 31