Cheap TEFL Courses
Looking for a cheap TEFL Course? Where is the balance between cheap and valuable?
The maxim that “you get what you pay for” is still fairly universally applicable – but when it comes to TEFL courses you can still do yourself some favours. To our mind, the notion of a course being cheap is only really applicable when you are getting a generic, fully comparable ‘product’ for less money in one place than another. This comes a bit unstuck when it comes to TEFL courses, because a TEFL course is not always the same – they go from one-day, 5-hour introductions through to 150-hour, 5-week intensives. Sure you can look at the out-and-out cheapest TEFL course or opt for the one that corresponds to the funds you have in your account, but you’re possibly always going to have that nagging doubt about value for money, and what the course you choose will teach you and allow you to do, both in terms of your performance in the classroom, and your ability to pick up a job in the UK or overseas. We don’t always wish to conclude that the best course to take is a 4-week intensive course with teaching practice, but the fact that many of these courses are externally moderated and assessed, and are therefore ‘standardised’ courses does mean that they can be directly compared. That means a Cambridge CELTA course is a Cambridge CELTA course wherever you take it, and ditto for the Trinity CertTESOL. If that’s its the name, you’ll get the same course content and same award, same certificate, same recognition wherever in the world you take it and wherever you decide to teach. This means that a Cambridge CELTA at London Covent Garden at £1200 plus is the same qualification as the Cambridge CELTA in Earls Court, London at around £800, and the same as the CELTA at all the prices in between.
So what does price come down to?
In part it’s the down to local competition and location. With so many schools in London, for example, offering the same qualification, schools have to keep their course prices as cheap as possible. Whereas in other areas of the country, such as Manchester, Newcastle or Bristol, the price comes in at over £1000, reflecting the lack of competition and hence these schools’ ability to demand a more realistic course fee. For courses in far-flung corners of the world, higher prices, besides in many cases reflecting the local cost of living, will also reflect the fact that a moderator has to fly out from another country to check the course and assess coursework, etc. (Note that many course prices abroad, however, are in fact surprisingly cheap.) Secondarily, it might come down to the school’s facilities, the space available to students, the state of the décor, and the relative positioning of a school in the town or city. Finally, there will be a correlation between the price of the course and the quality of the course over and above the minimum required by the various awarding bodies. This could mean that your trainer, instead of being recently approved (with maybe 5-10 years’ teaching and training experience) may have 20-30 years behind them as well as a string of successful course books to their name. Whilst all these considerations will be important, at the end of the day it is usually best to take the course in your home town, where you can reduce the total cost by removing the need for paid accommodation or excessive travel. Failing that, the all-round cheapest TEFL course option might be to travel to the country you intend to teach in, and then stay out there. Purely from an environmental/CO2 emissions point of view, it’s better to fly to one destination and stay there for a year or so too.
