What Is QTS? Qualified Teacher Status Explained for English Teachers

What Is QTS?

QTS stands for Qualified Teacher Status. It is the professional status you need to take a qualified teacher post in a maintained school in England, and in the government’s own words, it is “a legal requirement to teach in many English schools”. It is awarded through teacher training, not through a TEFL course.

Key takeaways

• QTS means qualified teacher status. It is a status awarded in England, not a course you buy.
• It is legally required in maintained schools and non-maintained special schools. Academies, free schools and independent schools can employ teachers without it.
• In November 2025, 97 per cent of teachers in state-funded schools in England held QTS.
• A TEFL qualification is not QTS and does not substitute for it, whatever its level or hours.
• A TEFL qualification is what language centres, international schools and online employers ask for by name, and QTS is rarely required for those roles.
• If an advert asks for QTS, no TEFL certificate will satisfy it. If it asks for a TEFL qualification, check the level and the awarding organisation instead.

What Does QTS Stand For, and Who Actually Needs It?

QTS stands for qualified teacher status. It is the professional recognition that says you have met the Teachers’ Standards in England and may be employed as a qualified teacher.

The important thing to understand at the outset is that QTS is a status rather than a certificate you study towards in isolation. You do not enrol on a QTS. You complete initial teacher training, or you are assessed against the standards, and QTS is what you come out holding.

It is also specific to England. Teachers trained in Wales have automatic recognition, and teachers qualified in Scotland or Northern Ireland can apply for QTS in England. Everyone else, including teachers qualified outside the UK, applies through a separate route.

One more distinction is worth making early, because it is the source of most of the confusion we see in our inbox. QTS is about who may be employed as a qualified teacher in a particular school system. It says nothing about whether you can teach English well, nor is it a measure of subject expertise in English language teaching. Those are separate judgements, made by different people, against different standards, and a teacher can be highly regarded on one and hold nothing at all on the other.

Where QTS Is Legally Required, and Where It Is Not

This is the part that decides whether QTS is relevant to you at all, and it is narrower than most people assume.

GOV.UK guidance states that “Qualified teacher status (QTS) is a legal requirement to teach in many English schools and is considered desirable for the majority of schools in England”. The legal requirement applies to maintained schools, which are state-funded community, voluntary controlled, foundation, and voluntary aided schools, and to non-maintained special schools.

Read the middle column and the shape of the thing becomes clear. QTS governs one specific category of job in one country. It is the single most important credential if that is the job you want, and close to irrelevant if it is not.

That is not a reason to dismiss it. Where QTS is not legally required, it is often still preferred, and the government’s own guidance says as much, describing QTS as “considered desirable for the majority of schools in England”. A school that may lawfully hire without it will frequently choose not to. The point is simply that preference and legal requirement are different things, and an advert usually tells you which one you are looking at if you read it closely.

How Many Teachers in England Hold QTS?

Almost all of them, and that is worth knowing before you assume there is a quiet back door into a state school classroom.

In the department’s own summary, “Most teachers held qualified teacher status (97%); the same as previous years”. The remaining three per cent sit largely in the settings listed in the table above, where the law does not require it. The full release is published at Explore Education Statistics and is updated annually.

How to cite this data. Attribute these figures to the Department for Education, “School workforce in England”, reporting year 2025/26, published 4 June 2026, and give the November 2025 census date alongside any number you quote, because the census is a single day snapshot and the workforce figures move each year. If you are quoting from this page rather than from the source, cite The TEFL Institute with the check date of 17 September 2026.

How Do You Get QTS?

There is no single route, and none of them is a short online course. Get Into Teaching, the Department for Education’s own service, sets out the main ones.

• Initial teacher training. Undergraduate or postgraduate. In the service’s wording, this “mostly involves school placements with some theoretical learning”.
• Teacher training with an academic qualification. You can gain “QTS with a postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE)”. The PGCE is the academic award; QTS is the status. They are often gained together, which is why people conflate them.
• An assessment-only programme. For people who can “show that you already meet the standards for QTS without having to do any more training”.
• Recognition from elsewhere in the UK. Automatic for teachers trained in Wales; an application for those qualified in Scotland or Northern Ireland.
• Applying from outside the UK. Qualified teachers from overseas “can teach in England for up to 4 years without QTS”, and can apply for QTS to stay beyond that.

All of these involve supervised classroom practice in schools, assessed against the Teachers’ Standards. That is the difference in kind between QTS and a qualification you complete at your own pace.

Is a TEFL Qualification the Same as QTS?

No, and this is the single most useful sentence on this page. A TEFL qualification is not QTS, does not lead to QTS, and does not count towards it. That is true of a 120-hour certificate, and it is equally true of a regulated Level 5 diploma, including ours.

The two things answer different questions. QTS asks whether you are recognised to teach as a qualified teacher in the English school system. A TEFL qualification asks whether you are trained to teach English to people learning it as an additional language, anywhere in the world.

We say this plainly because the opposite is said so often. If any provider suggests that its TEFL course puts you on a path to a qualified teacher post in a state school in England, that claim is wrong, and it is the kind of claim worth walking away from.

QTS, PGCE, CELTA and Level 5: How They Differ

Four names that get used as though they were interchangeable, and are not.

Only the bottom two rows are English language teaching qualifications, and only the bottom row sits on a public register you can search by number. If the word “level” matters to an employer, it is worth understanding what the Regulated Qualifications Framework is, and which organisation actually awards your certificate. The Trinity CertTESOL belongs in the same family as CELTA.

The conflation that causes real damage is the first two rows. Because a PGCE and QTS are so often gained on the same course, people assume that any postgraduate teaching qualification brings the status with it. It does not. There are PGCE routes that do not confer QTS, and there is a route to QTS that involves no PGCE at all. If a job depends on it, the thing to confirm is the status, not the certificate hanging next to it.

Can You Teach English in England Without QTS?

Yes, in several settings, and a large number of people do.

Academies and free schools may employ teachers without QTS, and together they account for a substantial share of secondary provision. Independent schools set their own requirements. Private language schools, summer schools and university pre sessional courses hire English language teachers on the strength of a language teaching qualification, and QTS rarely appears in those adverts at all.

Support roles are a separate category again. Schools recruit teaching assistants and specialist support staff to work with pupils who are learning English alongside the curriculum, and those posts are set locally rather than by statute. If that is the work you have in mind, our guide to what EAL means explains how schools record and describe those learners, and what the adverts are actually asking for.

Does QTS Help If You Want to Teach English Abroad?

It helps, but not in the way people expect, and it is not a requirement.

International schools value QTS highly, and for homeroom and subject teaching posts overseas a recognised teaching licence is frequently the thing that separates two candidates. That is a genuine advantage, and it is worth knowing about.

For teaching English specifically, the picture is different. Language centres, online platforms and government placement schemes ask for a degree where the visa requires one, and then for a recognised English language teaching qualification. QTS is not the credential being checked, and holding it does not eliminate the need for a TEFL qualification if the employer has requested one.

It is worth saying the reverse as well, since we are in the business of selling the second thing. A TEFL qualification will not get you a qualified teacher post in a maintained school in England, and we will not pretend otherwise on a page about QTS. What it will do is open the roles where language teaching is the job: abroad, online, in language centres, in summer provision, and in the independent and international sectors that hire on subject expertise. Those are large markets, and they are the ones our graduates work in.

How to Check What a Role Actually Requires

Four questions, in this order. They take a couple of minutes and save a great deal of wasted study time.

• Is the employer a maintained school in England? If yes, a qualified teacher post requires QTS; nothing else will do.
• Does the advert say QTS, or does it say TEFL, TESOL or CELTA? These are different asks. Answer the one in front of you.
• If it asks for a qualification, does it state a level? A stated level means a regulated qualification, and a regulated qualification has a number you can look up.
• Who awards the qualification you are considering? If no awarding organisation is named anywhere, that is the answer to the question.

On that last pair, our guide to what Ofqual is and what Ofqual regulated actually means covers the register and the phrases that turn up in TEFL marketing but are not real categories. The wider set of acronyms is laid out on our TEFL qualifications and terminology page.

Your Next Step

If you want to be a qualified teacher in an English state school, the route is initial teacher training, and Get Into Teaching is where to start. Nothing on this site is a substitute for that, and we would rather say so.

If what you actually want is to teach English abroad, online or in a language centre, the qualification employers name is a TEFL qualification with a level you can verify. Our 180-hour Ofqual-regulated Level 5 TEFL Diploma is listed on the Ofqual register as 610/1571/4, awarded by Highfield Qualifications, organisation number RN5219. You can check that number before you enrol, which is the whole point of a regulated qualification.