A bit of TEFL justice

Paul Lowe and his former sidekick Ashley Arnold have been given fines, community service and (for Paul) a suspended sentence for the notorious time when Windsor Schools took money off students for a Trinity TESOL course knowing full well that they had already lost the right to give Trinity Certs. According to some of their victims, they thought it was a Trinity course the whole way through and were therefore shocked to be given a virtually worthless own-brand Windsor Cert at the end of the course. Details of the verdict in the local newspaper here.

So, should we all be happy that there really is justice in the TEFL world then? Not quite.

For one thing, the prosecution was brought about by the local Trading Standards, whereas if I was Trinity I would’ve been suing the pants off him the minute I found out that he was abusing my name. Trinity maybe thought it was better to improve the perception of the quality of TEFL courses by hushing the whole thing up, rather than actually improving the quality of TEFL courses by shutting down as many bad schools as possible.

Secondly, Trinity and Cambridge ESOL have no rules about the ownership of schools that would prevent centres owned by someone with a history of bankruptcies, convictions for fraud etc from offering their Certs, just so long as the actual training staff were properly qualified and trained. The same is true for schools with British Council accreditation in the UK. I believe that is TEFLtastically wrong.*

Another possible concern is that Paul tried to use the fact that there had been an online campaign against him as part of his defence! I can’t see how that could be a mitigating circumstance, especially as the campaigns only started due to his attacks and that they only started after he had commited the fraud he has just been prosecuted for, but I will be chewing on that fact nonetheless.

* The views of Alex Case are not necessarily the views of TEFL.net, the TEFL world,  TEFL teachers generally, his wife, his parents, his siblings, his pets, people in the country he lives in, the editors of the newspaper he reads, people he links to on his blog, people who link to his blog, or even of himself when he’s had a chance to sit down and think about it carefully

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 9:36 pm and is filed under British Council accreditation, Cambridge ESOL, CELTA, Dodgy TEFL courses, Dodgy TEFL school owners, Teacher training, TEFL, TEFL certificate, TEFL in the UK, TEFL qualifications, TEFL scams, TEFL villains- Paul Lowe, Trinity, Trinity CertTESOL, Windsor Schools, Windsor TEFL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.