Things are not looking good for the ELT industry:
Jay Doubleyou: "this has been a dire, dire situation for the industry since the pandemic started"
.
Here are the numbers - which are not very good:
.
Meanwhile, politicians are lobbying the Prime Minister:
Backbench MPs in UK call on Johnson for ELT support
.
And the schools are demonstrating in London:
UK ELT brings business rate relief campaign to Parliament
Members of the UK’s ELT sector held a day of action in Parliament this week to raise awareness of the challenges that language schools are facing as a result of the pandemic...
Speaking with The PIE News during the protest, English UK said that 56 of its members had closed – about 14% of the organisation’s membership pre-pandemic.
More language schools are now hanging in the balance, with some facing court action over not being able to pay business rates from the previous year...
UK ELT brings business rate relief campaign to Parliament
.
Meanwhile, in Malta, things are looking very bad:
Malta gov to shut all English language schools from July 14
Government 'unilaterally' decided to close ELT schools - Newsbook
.
The ELT industry is pretty imporatant, as this piece from the FT in February pointed out:
English language schools wracked by UK Covid crisis
Pandemic has left them with few students and limited access to government relief measures
Alicia Clegg
FEBRUARY 18 2021
Two years ago at the UN Appeals Tribunal in New York a Brazilian labour judge was struggling to hold her own. Martha Halfeld Furtado de Mendonça Schmidt, the jurist, says she felt stressed, hamstrung by her stilted English in an anglophone environment. “It was as if there was a glass window,” she recalls. One through which she could see, but not speak.
So in 2019 she enrolled at Beet, a family-run language school in Bournemouth on Britain’s south coast. Judge Halfeld has since become president of the tribunal. She says the coaching she received from her teachers, in classes and on country bike rides, helped her become “talkative” in English, and sensitive to its nuances. The distinction between “glance and glimpse — the one voluntary, the other involuntary — can make all the difference to a judgment,” she says.
No comments:
Post a Comment