TEFL Insider Part Six- Nova and the CELTA

To prove that I am capable of not only the idle speculation of the average post on this blog (but then, isn’t that what a blog is for?) but also of getting down and dirty in the trenches of TEFL, I’ve been given my TEFL Press Card, a rusty old Remington typewriter and a pack of filterless French cigarettes and become what can almost be described as a journalist. Yes, those of you standing around outside the kiosks and corner shops of the world waiting for the latest edition of the EL Gazette hot off the press will have noticed not one, but two articles by Alex Case, direct from war torn Tokyo.

The first article was about the demise or not of Nova, a subject of which I knew very little before I started reading up on it, and now at least I only know as little as everyone else.

http://www.elgazette.com/index.cfm?action=2&more=1&id=101

The latest on this story, courtesy of Google news alerts, seems to be they have stopped all new teachers coming out, but some have arrived to find a letter in their new accommodation telling them they are being evicted! But at least the trauma of not getting paid is over for everyone, at least until the 15th of this month…

The other story was also about the trials and tribulations of new teachers, this time about how the Fagins of TEFL empty your pockets before you even get to Thailand and try to take a tuk tuk. As the story only made the paper version of the EL Gazette, the electronic version is exclusive to TEFLtastic:

As we speak, more and more Cambridge CELTA initial TEFL teacher training course providers the world over are realising that the best time to get money off trainees is when they are completely ignorant and gullible, i.e. when they first send off their application form. I first got a sniff of this story on the TEFL.net forum, where one person innocently mentioned they wanted to check out the standard of English Language House in Milton Keynes before they sent off their application and the (more or less) non-refundable 50 pound interview fee/ deposit. To which we all answered “Interview fee??? Fifty quid to be shown the chairs with flaps and get grilled on your grammar for 10 minutes?? I know minor celebrities that charge less for their time!”

Chasing this up with Cambridge ESOL, the exam body of CELTA, they said as the charge was clearly stated (which it was in an email but not on the website) there was nothing they can do. And indeed it seems they are doing a whole load of nothing, as although this is the only British centre to charge you money on application they will then keep if you decide they are crap and you want to go elsewhere, centres in France, the Middle East and North America are happily taking money off people for the pleasure of having your application form read. Strangely, both St Giles and Saxoncourt only charge application fees for the CELTA at their American centres and not their UK ones.

But of course the worst characters in the Usual Suspects of TEFL rip off merchants do their dirty business on the Internet. Bridgetefl, for example, will not even look at your application until they have got their hands on $375 dollars of your money. And the English Language School in Denver page of www.studyabroadinternational.com makes it quite clear that the most important part of your application is the non-refundable (unless they reject you) deposit of $675. That’s right, if you decided for one reason or another to be a sensible customer and shop around for CELTA courses, choosing to go to the best centre after having gone to an interview or two, you could lose over $1000 dollars for the privilege! Plus of course the fees for the course you finally decided to take…

I would like to suggest this system is not giving the customers the best power to choose, or putting any pressure on the centres to improve and not just milk the system. Cambridge would like to suggest (politely) that I sod off and mind my own business, so there doesn’t seem to be a lot we can do.

It seems the only way to fight the power here is to make sure people don’t pay any money with their applications until the system dies out. I always keep an eye out for this topic on the teacher training threads of websites, ready to jump in with a warning to be careful with their money before they go into the dark, smelly, Victorian London streets of TEFL teacher training, and if anyone else can help by doing the same perhaps we can make this world a more TEFLtastic place…

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 11:55 pmand is filed under CELTA, Cambridge ESOL, Nova, TEFL, TEFL certificate, TEFL scams, TESOL, Teacher forums, Teacher training, Teaching English in Japan, links. 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.