WHY ARE WE DOING THIS PROJECT?
Every year UKLC recruit more than 100 teachers from all over the UK and offer them residential teaching positions during the summer months. We have been operating since 2001 and have an excellent reputation in the language market as a provider and amongst teachers as an employer.
When recruiting teachers for our courses, we receive a great deal of applications from graduates who have completed a four-week teacher training course in EFL but have no teaching experience other than the six mandatory hours of observed teaching practice on the course.
Since the most recognised EFL courses deal predominantly with how to teach English to adults and give little or no direction to trainees about how to teach young learners and teenagers (7-16yrs), this project will give these graduates the extra training necessary to enable them to teach younger students confidently. With increasing numbers of foreign children and teenagers coming to the UK to learn English, there are more jobs available with this age group and graduates with no experience of teaching them will not be considered.
The British Council criteria stipulate that accredited organisations must take “particular care (to) monitor and guide inexperienced teachers”. As with many other employers in this sector in the UK and abroad, we cannot employ more than a handful of such applicants to satisfactorily fulfil this criterion and give them the support they need. This means that many qualified English language teachers find it very difficult to get their first job.
Our aim is to act as the stepping stone for people between finishing their EFL training course and starting out in full time teaching work.