Use An Accreditation Body To Ensure Continued Compliance

TEFL Accrediting Organisation

The first stages of certification from a TEFL accreditation body are generally proactive, that is, the courses taught to accreditation hopefuls are standardized and form the first step toward accreditation of a particular body such as a school system. The school faculty is not initiallyassessed for TEFL compliance before they have had a chance to be trained. As a school seeks general compliance, it begins by educating its key educators, followed by the remainder of the faculty, taught in waves, and moving the entire faculty toward accreditation. The beauty of the standardized accreditation is that the process for the individual teachers does not need to be conducted at the facility. Accredited teachers can be hired with the TEFL accreditationtraining in place, and future applicants for teaching positions can receive the TEFL accreditation as a requirement.

However, once the individual faculty is trained, then the principles of the accreditation must be maintained and at times, key training must be refreshed. This is an excellent job for a TEFL accreditation body. In their role as a TEFL maintenance provider, they can administrator compliance testing on a faculty wide basis rather than an individual basis, and efficiently keep the program intact for the entire school.

In efforts to cut costs, many schools try to avoid or trim down the amount of maintenance they need. However, if they perform a long term cost analysis, they generally find that the best path is to continue with the prescribed schedule for maintenance. The reason for this is that once maintenance is delayed for a month, then it can be easy to delay if for a budget year. After a particular amount of time, the maintenance is not enough to keep the individual faculty sharp – without regular feedback, they become lax, often to the point of requiring complete training from scratch. However, this is also a benefit of maintenance: it does not require anywhere near the commitment of resources that the initial training required. Often, compliance is estimated to take fewer than 10% of the resources of the initial training.

This leads to another benefit of compliance testing through a TEFL accreditation body: the teaching methods are based on results. As a school faculty faithfully maintains their TEFL skills, the students respond with increasingly higher grades, primarily in English, but extending to all subjects because of the dependency of teaching on understanding the English language. These results can be used to justify continued maintenance during the most difficult of budget negotiations. Because more and more schools are being graded on the performance of their students, the maintenance from the TEFL Accreditation Body will be seen as the necessity it is.