Something has been intriguing me for many years now, writes Jason West. Why, oh why, is the UK (if not the world's) TEFL industry so deadly dull when it comes to marketing itself? In 1994 I walked into the ARELS Workshop in Brighton for the first time and turned to my then business partner and said 'Wow, this is virgin territory'.
All school brochures look the same, all the ads say the same things (in bullet form with inane smiling faces and stock photography) ... they are truly terrible. Just look in the trade press and you will see what I mean.
In fact, the whole industry is stuck in the 70's. A cottage industry that beyond the inherently highly unadventurous and uber corporate 'big three or four' is just bland, bland , bland.
My theory is that because most schools sell to agents and not direct to the customer, they do not have a direct dialogue with the customer and their agents use their own sales materials and naturally favour those who give them the biggest slice of pie (and that's another whole story in itself).
Also, because everyone sells the same courses, taught by people with the same qualifications and training, using pretty much the same methodology, there is something of a 'vanilla' flavour about the whole market.
How many industries can proudly boast just one or two new products in the last thirty years? The language travel industry has spent years trying to tack bits onto their core product, without changing the core product.
Think, 'English Plus' and 'Work Experience'. The innovation and new product creation has come by adding other, non-language teaching products to the same old same old.
So maybe that, combined with the predominantly agent driven sales and a powerful conventional publishing arm that sells generic coursebooks across massive areas of the globe for maximum profitability whilst employing authors who teach in schools and colleges and who then perpetuate the cycle by buying each others' course books in bulk and basing whole courses on them (most British Council accredited schools have a core text book for each level) ... is why we have such a drab and declining industry.
