Not much to report this week since I have been working on the re-launch of EOT in London.  This has been quite an involved and interesting process.  After years of running English schools in London, from Leicester Square School of English which I co-founded in 1992 to English Out There in 2001 I have always, roughly, operated my schools on the same principles as all of the other schools. That is, find a suitable building, recruit some teachers, interest some agent contacts, do some local promotion and then travel to see agents, British Council offices and go to fairs. In 1996 that little list also included ‘build a website’ for the first time.  The school always needed an office, some classrooms, a common room, a quiet self-study area and a staffroom. And that, pretty much, is the formula that most study abroad schools still use.

The two main costs of a language school like the one described above are teachers and premises, with premises, especially in London, taking up a large amount of money. Critical mass has always been crucial with language schools because there is a ‘chicken and egg’ situation when you start one that never really goes away.

You need to have a certain number of classrooms and a certain number of teachers to be able to offer sufficient class levels.  So there’s a large fixed cost to start with. Then you need to be able to hit your break-even as soon as possible so that your start up money doesn’t run out before you have had time to get things going with overseas promotion (which takes a while, a couple of  years, to start producing results). Break-even is often talked about in terms of the number of people in each class.

That in itself is interesting because what you started out wanting to do was run an English school and help people to speak English. What you end up doing, and believe me it takes up a lot of your time and effort at the start if not continually from then on, is trying to get more ‘bums on seats’ so that you hit break-even and then make a profit.  It is a difficult balancing act and one that since I started LSSE has resulted in a rise in cut-throat competition based upon price (at the cheap end of the market) and commissions (from the mid to high end). In 1994 we paid agents between 12 and 18% of our course fee.  I know for a fact that some schools in London last year paid 50% of the course fee, just to get the business from the agent and referred to it as ‘cashflow’. In other words to get the income, they sacrificed any profit on it in order to make their other deals their profitable ones and at the same time stopped anyone else getting the income.

Why has this happened?  It is hard to know, but in my opinion a combination of everyone selling the same or very similar courses (General English, Cambridge exams, IELTS, Executive, etc.) using the same methodology for each and having to comply with a very standardised and prescriptive accreditation scheme that makes one school very much like another in terms of the way it operates and interacts with its customers. Plus, the campaign agents waged in the nineties to discourage schools from selling directly from their websites and the growth of agent fairs made the industry very reliant on traditional language travel agencies.  When the only flavour on offer is ‘vanilla’ and the main supply of business is offshore via third parties then the people with the students have control.  Hence commissions have ballooned over the years.

Last week I mentioned the new legislation coming in in the UK at the end of March. It seems that some of the ‘less prestigious’ schools (those who have been likened to ’visa shops’) are going to get (or have already become) accredited for vocational course provision (IT, marketing, etc.) in order to become ‘sponsor’ schools and be able to issue visa letters…with English courses running in the background.  Some have become accredited by the British Council and remain as English schools primarily (people have told me ‘anyone can get accredited these days’!).  Some have shut I believe, or are about to.

The seismic change centres around visa issuance really because everyone is still going to be running their schools the way everyone else runs their schools and they will still be selling vanilla.  What the visa issuance is going to do, my contacts tell me, is to some extent make overseas agencies work harder for their commissions, maybe even reduce commissions and very possibly take agents out of the system completely.  Because the student/agent/consulate relationship will be less important, the schools will have all of the power with regards visas through their newly acquired ‘sponsor’ status.

So, the focus of the industry, to all intents and purposes, will now focus on legally, as opposed to illegally, selling visas and trying to lower the break-even point in the classroom by paying agents less and getting more direct bookings. All cemented and kept in place by the vanilla offering that binds one course product with another.

This is the English language teaching industry of the home of the English language, and it has decided its product is perfect, that one size fits all and that the thing to focus on is immigration and bums on seats. Like so many large regulated industries, the purpose has been lost. UK ELT is now about visas, not improving ways of helping people to speak our language or providing new, better and value for money products.

Contrast that with what is happening online.  Language exchange websites are springing up and flourishing, real practice is the currency of choice and technology is enabling teachers to teach from anywhere and supplement their wages; some now make a living online.  The materials, the methodologies and the focused interaction are often very different from the conventional accredited ELT classroom. It is a lot more experimental.  Learners choose what style and method, the technology and even the materials (audio, video, VoIP, language exchange, social network, text chat, blog…) suits their own learning style, and they combine concepts and ideas to create their own palette of tools. Online it is about what works and what entertains. Often the two are inextricably linked.

What will happen when the oil runs out and people stop flying so often and so cheaply? When online video is 3D.  When we can smell, taste and touch down a fibre optic cable and record anything we do online in any format and merge them effortlessly? When Second Life doesn’t require a NASA sized PC to run smoothly.  Will English schools in the UK drop the ‘English’ and hang out signs saying ‘Ye Olde Visa Shoppe’, but do it legally this time around.

Or as one US commentator on a website I have just stumbled into and have never heard of before and don’t really understand or believe has anything sensible to say (called ‘The Trumpet’) bellowed recently,

“For while many see the effect of national decline, few understand the true cause: disobedience to God and His laws, morals and standards. And because that cause plagues all the nations of end-time Israel, they are all reaping the bitter results. Britain is just leading the way.” (for the full force of God’s wrath go to: http://www.thetrumpet.com/index.php?q=5954.4329.0.0)

Amen, peace be with you J