QTLS stands for Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills. It is a professional status for teachers and trainers in the further education and skills sector in England, awarded by the Society for Education and Training. The Department for Education says holders may be eligible to work as qualified teachers in schools in England.

Key takeaways

• QTLS means Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills. It is a professional status, not a course you enrol on and pass.
• It is awarded by the Society for Education and Training, and the Department for Education points anyone asking about it to that body.
• A QTLS holder who is a member of that society may be eligible to work as a qualified teacher in schools in England.
• Entry asks for a teaching qualification at Level 5 or above, Level 2 maths, Level 2 English and a Level 3 subject qualification.
• Professional formation runs for six months and asks for at least 230 hours of teaching groups of five or more learners.
• QTLS is an England specific status. It does not replace a TEFL qualification and employers abroad do not ask for it.

What Does QTLS Stand For, and Who Awards It?

QTLS stands for Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills. The four letters describe a professional status held by teachers and trainers in the further education and skills sector in England, which covers colleges, adult and community learning, work based training, prison education and the ESOL classrooms where a great many English language teachers in the United Kingdom actually work.
It is awarded by the Society for Education and Training, the membership body run by the Education and Training Foundation. The Department for Education does not award it and does not assess it. What the department does is recognise it, which is a different and more interesting thing.
The Foundation describes the status plainly. QTLS is designed for teachers and trainers working in the further education and skills sector, with appropriate and current teaching practice. Read that last clause twice, because it rules out anyone hoping to collect the status first and find the teaching job afterwards. You have to be teaching to earn it.

QTLS or QTS: Which One Does Your Job Need?

This is the question the whole topic turns on, and the answer surprises most people who ask it.
Qualified teacher status is the professional status attached to school teaching in England, gained through teacher training and assessed against the teachers’ standards. QTLS is the further education equivalent, gained by an already practising teacher who demonstrates their practice over a set period. Two routes, two sectors, one shared destination in law.
The Department for Education states the position on its own guidance page: if you are an experienced post-14 teacher and have QTLS status and membership of the Society for Education and Training, you may be eligible to work as a qualified teacher in schools in England.
Two conditions, both of them load bearing. The status on its own is not enough. Membership of the society has to be current as well, which means QTLS is the rare qualification you can effectively stop holding by not paying a subscription. Anyone relying on it for a school post should treat the renewal date as a professional obligation rather than an administrative nuisance.
Our guide to what qualified teacher status is and where it is legally required sets out the school side of the same picture.

The Published Facts on QTLS, and Where They Come From

Everything in the table below is quoted from the awarding body, the Department for Education or the statute book rather than paraphrased from experience, because this is a subject where confident summaries are usually out of date.

One detail in that table is worth pausing on, because almost nobody writes it down. The 2012 regulations that created the school recognition do not name the Society for Education and Training at all. They name the Institute for Learning, the body that awarded QTLS at the time, in a new paragraph added to the schedule of qualified teachers. The Department for Education’s current guidance names the Society for Education and Training instead. The recognition survived the change of awarding body, which is why you will still find articles online citing the older name.
How to cite this data. Attribute each row to the body named in the right hand column and give the check date of 24 September 2026, since fees and eligibility criteria are revised without notice and the government guidance page is maintained rather than frozen. If you are quoting this comparison rather than the underlying sources, cite The TEFL Institute and the same check date.

How Do You Get QTLS?

Through professional formation, which is the process of showing that you already teach to the required standard rather than being taught how to.
You apply to the Society for Education and Training, meet the entry criteria above, and then work through a structured programme while continuing to teach. The Foundation describes it as a six month programme taking around four hours a week, alongside at least 230 hours of teaching groups of five or more learners across the same period. Published fees are fifty five pounds to apply and five hundred and seventy pounds for the programme itself.
The subject requirement is the one that catches people out. You need a Level 3 or higher qualification in the subjects you teach for five or more hours a week. For vocational teachers the Foundation says it may accept a Level 2 qualification where there are five or more years of industry experience behind it, which is a sensible allowance for people who learned their trade before they taught it.
For an English language teacher the practical reading is this. Your subject is English language teaching, so the subject qualification and the Level 5 teaching qualification tend to be the same conversation, and a regulated Level 5 qualification on the Regulated Qualifications Framework is the level the criteria are written around.

Does QTLS Help You Teach English Abroad?

Honestly, no, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than letting the acronym do work it cannot do.
QTLS is a status defined by English regulations and recognised by an English government department. Language centres in Spain, online platforms hiring from anywhere and government placement schemes in Asia are not reading English further education statute. They ask for three things in some combination: a recognised English language teaching qualification, a degree where the visa rules demand one, and the right to work.
That said, it is not worthless on an international application either. A teacher who holds QTLS is demonstrably an experienced practitioner who has been assessed in a real classroom, and international schools and better paying institutions do read that signal. It simply is not the thing being asked for, and a strong answer to a question nobody asked is still not an answer.
The reverse is equally true, and we should say it even though we sell the other thing. A TEFL qualification will not give you QTLS, and it will not make you a qualified teacher in an English school. What it does is open the roles where teaching English is the job.

QTLS, QTS and a TEFL Qualification Compared

Three credentials, three different purposes, and a great deal of avoidable confusion between them.

The first two rows are statuses. The second two are qualifications. A status is permission to hold a kind of post, granted by a body with the authority to grant it. A qualification is evidence that you were trained and assessed. People use the words interchangeably in conversation and then discover, usually at the worst moment, that a job advert did not.
Where the rows meet is the Level 5 line. A regulated Level 5 teaching qualification is the entry ticket QTLS asks for, which is the single most useful thing an English language teacher in England can know about this status.

Where QTLS Genuinely Pays Off

There are three situations where the six months and the fees earn themselves back.
The first is a career in further education in England. QTLS is the recognised professional status of that sector, and in colleges it carries the weight that qualified teacher status carries in schools. If you teach ESOL or adult English in a college, this is your professional status rather than a curiosity.
The second is moving from further education into a school. The 2012 recognition exists precisely so that experienced post-14 teachers are not forced to retrain from scratch, and it has been in force for well over a decade now.
The third is pay and progression. Sector employers recognise the status in job specifications and in promotion criteria, and holding it removes the awkward conversation about whether an experienced college teacher is formally qualified. Many teachers pair it with structured continuing professional development, which is how the society expects members to maintain the status once they hold it.

Where QTLS Is the Wrong Tool

And three situations where it is not what you should be buying.
If your plan is to teach English abroad, QTLS is a long way round to a door it does not open. The employer wants a TEFL qualification, a degree if the visa needs one, and a clean background check.
If your plan is online teaching, the same applies with more force. Online platforms publish their requirements openly, and none of them asks for an England specific further education status.
If you are not currently teaching in the further education and skills sector, you cannot start. Current teaching practice is an entry condition, not something you arrange later, and the 230 hours have to happen somewhere real. Getting the teaching first is the step, and a recognised teaching qualification is usually what gets you that teaching.

Can You Hold QTLS and a TEFL Qualification?

Yes, and for anyone teaching English in the United Kingdom it is close to the natural pairing.
A Level 5 TEFL qualification trains you in the subject and is the kind of qualification the QTLS criteria are written around. QTLS then recognises you as a professional practitioner in the sector where that teaching happens. One is evidence of training, the other is recognition of practice, and they stack rather than compete.
The usual order is the qualification first, the teaching post second, the status third, because the status requires the teaching. Teachers who go the other way round tend to find the entry criteria waiting for them.
If you are still untangling the acronyms themselves, our guide to what a PGCE is and how it differs from a teaching status covers the other half of this confusion, and the full set is laid out on our TEFL qualifications and terminology page.

How to Check What a Job Actually Asks For

Three questions, in order, and they take about a minute.

• Is it naming a status or a qualification? QTLS and QTS are statuses. A TEFL diploma, a CELTA and a PGCE are qualifications. Answer the one in front of you rather than the one you happen to hold.
• Which country’s rules apply? QTLS is meaningful in England. It carries no legal weight in a Spanish language centre or a Vietnamese school, however good a teacher it proves you are.
• Does the advert state a level? A stated level means a regulated qualification, and a regulated qualification carries a reference number you can look up on a public register before you spend anything.

Your Next Step

If you teach in further education in England and you meet the criteria, the route is professional formation through the Society for Education and Training, and the Education and Training Foundation’s own pages are where to start. Nothing we sell replaces that process, and we would rather say so than sell you the wrong thing.
If your goal 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. It is also a Level 5 teaching qualification, which is the level the QTLS criteria are written around. You can check that number before you pay, which is exactly what a regulated qualification is for.

The post What Is QTLS? Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills Status Explained appeared first on TEFL Institute.

PGCE stands for Postgraduate Certificate in Education. It is an academic teaching qualification awarded by a university, usually gained alongside teacher training in the UK. The Department for Education is explicit that “you do not need a PGCE to be a qualified teacher in England”, because the legal requirement is qualified teacher status, not the certificate.

Key takeaways

• PGCE means Postgraduate Certificate in Education. It is an academic award from a university, not a licence to teach.
• The Department for Education states plainly that you do not need a PGCE to be a qualified teacher in England.
• Two different qualifications share the initials. The Postgraduate Certificate in Education sits at master’s level, and the Professional Graduate Certificate in Education sits at honours level.
• A PGCE can carry up to 60 credits at master’s level, against the 180 credits usually needed for a full master’s degree.
• A PGCE is not a TEFL qualification and does not train you to teach English as a foreign language.
• For teaching English abroad, online or in a language centre, employers name a TEFL qualification and a verifiable level. They rarely mention a PGCE at all.

What Does PGCE Stand For, and Why Are There Two Versions?

PGCE stands for Postgraduate Certificate in Education. The complication, and it is one almost nobody explains, is that the same four letters are used for two qualifications pitched at different academic levels.

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, the independent body that maintains the UK’s qualifications frameworks, sets out the distinction. A Professional Graduate Certificate in Education is “pitched at Honours level”, aligning with the framework descriptor at level 6. A Postgraduate Certificate in Education is “pitched at Master’s level”, aligning at level 7. Both, in the agency’s words, combine “professional training leading to Qualified teacher status (QTS) and a course of academic study leading to an academic qualification”.

So one set of initials, two academic altitudes, and universities are expected to make clear which one they are offering. If you are comparing courses and the level is not stated anywhere in the prospectus, that is a question worth asking before you apply rather than after.

The second half of that agency quotation matters just as much. A PGCE bundles two separate things together: the academic study, and the professional training. People then treat the bundle as a single item, which is how most of the confusion in this area begins.

PGCE or QTS: Which One Does the Job Actually Require?

This is the question that decides whether a PGCE is relevant to you, and the answer is not the one most applicants assume.

Qualified teacher status is the professional status you need to hold a qualified teacher post in a maintained school in England. In the government’s own wording, it is “a legal requirement to teach in many English schools”. A PGCE is the academic certificate that often, but not always, sits alongside it.

The Department for Education’s own service is blunt about this. On its guidance for people asking what a PGCE is, it states that “you do not need a PGCE to be a qualified teacher in England”, and that teacher training courses lead to one of three outcomes: QTS only, QTS with a PGCE, or a PGCE without QTS.

Read that list again, because it is the whole point. You can gain the status without the certificate. You can gain the certificate without the status. Most people gain both at once and never discover they were two things.

If a school post depends on it, confirm the status. If a university, an overseas employer or a further study route asks for the academic award, confirm the certificate. Our guide to what qualified teacher status is and where it is legally required sets out which settings can and cannot employ teachers without it.

The Published Facts on a PGCE, and Where They Come From

Everything in the table below is quoted from an official or independent source rather than paraphrased from experience, because this is the sort of topic where confident second hand summaries are usually wrong.

The last row is there for comparison rather than competition. A regulated Level 5 qualification on the Regulated Qualifications Framework and a level 7 PGCE are not rivals, because they are not doing the same job. One trains you to teach English to speakers of other languages. The other is an academic award attached to school teacher training in the UK. The levels tell you about academic demand, not about which one an employer will ask you for.

How to cite this data. Attribute each row to the source named in the right hand column, and give the check date of 23 September 2026, since government guidance pages are revised without notice and the qualification levels list is maintained by GOV.UK rather than frozen. The exact published wording is at the GOV.UK list of qualification levels. If you are quoting this comparison rather than the underlying sources, cite The TEFL Institute and the same check date.

How Do You Get a PGCE?

Through a university, as part of postgraduate teacher training, and normally with a bachelor’s degree already in hand.

The route is an application to an accredited provider, a period of academic study, and school placements assessed against the professional standards. Courses run full time or part time. The Department for Education’s service notes that a PGCE “can award up to 60 credits at master’s level which you could use towards a full master’s qualification”, which is usually 180 credits, so a PGCE is a third of a master’s rather than a master’s in itself.

That last detail is one of the most commonly misstated facts in the whole area. A PGCE is not a master’s degree. It is a certificate at master’s level, which is a different claim, and the credit figures are the reason.

Do You Need a PGCE to Teach English Abroad?

No. In several years of reading job adverts for this market, the PGCE almost never appears in one.

Language centres, online platforms and government placement schemes ask for three things in some combination: a degree where the visa rules demand one, a recognised English language teaching qualification, and the right to work. A PGCE satisfies the first of those if it sits on top of a bachelor’s degree, and it does not satisfy the second at all, because it is not a qualification in teaching English as a foreign language.

International schools are the exception worth naming. For subject and homeroom posts overseas, a recognised teaching licence and an academic teaching qualification carry real weight, and a PGCE with QTS is a strong pairing in that market. But those are school teaching jobs that happen to be abroad, not English language teaching jobs, and the two markets recruit on different paperwork.

It is only fair to state the reverse, since we sell the other thing. A TEFL qualification will not make you a qualified teacher in an English state school, and no amount of marketing changes that. What it does is open the roles where teaching English is the job.

PGCE or TEFL: What Employers Actually Name

Four credentials, four different purposes, and a great deal of avoidable confusion between them.

The practical difference between the bottom two rows is verification. A regulated qualification carries a number on a public register, so an employer can check it in a minute. An unregulated certificate rests on the provider’s own reputation, which may be perfectly good, but is a different kind of assurance.

The practical difference between the top two rows is the one this page exists to fix. A PGCE is paperwork from a university. QTS is permission from the state. They usually arrive together and they are not the same thing.

Where a PGCE Genuinely Pays Off

There are three situations where a PGCE earns its considerable cost in time and fees.

The first is a career in UK schools. If you want to teach a subject in a maintained school in England, you need QTS, and the postgraduate route that delivers it most commonly delivers a PGCE alongside it. Taking the academic award while you are there is usually sensible.

The second is international schools. The British curriculum international sector recruits heavily from UK trained teachers, and a PGCE with QTS is close to a standard expectation at the better paying end of that market.

The third is further study. Those 60 master’s level credits are real and portable. If you expect to complete a master’s in education later, starting with a third of it already banked is a genuine head start, and it is the main reason people choose a level 7 PGCE over a level 6 one.

Where a PGCE Is the Wrong Tool

And three where it is not the qualification to buy.

If your plan is to teach English abroad for a year or two, a PGCE is a long and expensive answer to a question nobody asked. The employer will want a TEFL qualification, a degree if the visa needs one, and a clean background check.

If your plan is online teaching, the same applies with more force, because online platforms publish their requirements openly and almost none of them list a PGCE.

If you are already a qualified teacher and simply want to move into English language teaching, the missing piece is subject training, not another academic certificate. That is also a good moment to think about what continuing professional development means for teachers, since a short specialist course often does more for an application than a second general qualification.

Can You Hold a PGCE and a TEFL Qualification?

Yes, and a good number of teachers do, usually in that order and for sound reasons.

A PGCE with QTS gives you the school classroom. A TEFL qualification gives you the language classroom, and with it the summer schools, the pre sessional university courses, the language centres abroad and the online market. Teachers who hold both tend to describe the TEFL qualification as the thing that made their CV portable.

There is no sequencing rule. Plenty of people take a TEFL qualification first, teach abroad for a few years, and only then decide whether UK school teaching is what they want. That is a perfectly reasonable order, and it has the advantage of testing the assumption cheaply before committing to a postgraduate year.

How to Read a Job Advert Properly

Three questions, in order, and they take about a minute.

• Does it name a status or a certificate? QTS is a status. A PGCE, a CELTA and a TEFL diploma are certificates. Answer the one in front of you.
• Does it state a level? A stated level means a regulated qualification, and a regulated qualification has a reference number you can look up on a public register.
• Who awards the qualification you are considering? If no awarding organisation is named anywhere on the provider’s site, that absence is the answer.

The full set of acronyms, and which of them are qualifications rather than descriptions, is laid out on our TEFL qualifications and terminology page.
There is a third route worth knowing about if you teach adults rather than schoolchildren. QTLS, or Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills, is the professional status of the further education sector in England, and it is earned by demonstrating existing practice rather than by taking a postgraduate course.
The nearest relative of this qualification is the PGDE, and the two are not simply longer and shorter versions of one another. In Scotland a PGDE is the accredited graduate route into teaching rather than an academic award sitting beside a separate status. Our guide to what a PGDE is in Scotland, England and Hong Kong sets out where the two part company.

Your Next Step

If your goal is a qualified teacher post in a UK school, the route is postgraduate teacher training, and the Department for Education’s Get Into Teaching service is the place to begin. Nothing we sell is a substitute for it, and we would rather say so plainly than sell you the wrong thing.

If your goal 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 pay, which is exactly what a regulated qualification is for.

The post What Is a PGCE? Postgraduate Certificate in Education Explained for English Teachers appeared first on TEFL Institute.

You apply to Novakid through its own recruitment site, where the posted Online ESL Teacher role asks for C1 English, a high school diploma, an international teaching certificate such as TEFL, TESOL or TEYL, and at least six months teaching English to children. Pay is stated only as compensation based on completed lessons.

Key takeaways

• Novakid is one of the stricter young learner platforms. Unlike Cambly and Preply, it will not take you without a certificate and without prior experience teaching children.
• The experience bar is specific and easy to miss: at least six months teaching English to children, not six months teaching in general.
• Novakid does not publish a rate. Its own listing says only that compensation is based on completed lessons, so any hourly figure you see online comes from a teacher, not from the company.
• The application is document heavy. Identity papers, citizenship and residence evidence, your degree or diploma and a short video introduction are all collected in one form.
• Novakid states that teachers from 56 countries are already on its team, and its listing names no nationality requirement.
• Because the certificate is checked rather than assumed, a qualification an employer can verify independently is worth more here than one that cannot be looked up.

Most guides to online teaching platforms are written for people who want the easiest door. This one is about a harder door, and the reason it is worth knowing about is that fewer people get through it. Novakid asks for things Cambly and Preply do not, which means the pool of applicants is smaller and the teachers who qualify are competing with fewer people.

What follows is taken from Novakid’s own recruitment listing and checked on the day of writing, alongside the published positions of three platforms it is usually compared with. Where a figure is not published, this guide says so rather than filling the gap.

What does Novakid require from teachers?

Six things, and two of them are the ones that catch people out. The certificate and the children specific experience are both screened, and the listing is explicit that a general teaching background is not the same thing.

How to cite this table. The TEFL Institute, “How to Apply to Novakid: Requirements, Process and What It Pays”, teflinstitute.com, requirements checked 21 September 2026 against Novakid’s own Online ESL Teacher listing. Platforms change entry rules without notice, so verify against the company’s own page before applying.

What does Novakid pay?

Novakid does not say. Its listing states that compensation is based on completed lessons and puts no number beside it, so there is no published rate to quote and this guide will not invent one.

That is worth taking seriously rather than treating as an oversight. When a platform publishes a rate, as Cambly does, you can compare before you apply. When it does not, the only figures available come from teachers posting on social media, and those figures vary by market, by hours worked and by how long the teacher has been on the platform. They are worth reading as impressions and worthless as a budget.

The practical move is to complete the process far enough to be told your own rate, and to treat that number, not a video, as the thing you decide on. Ask specifically what a cancelled or no show lesson pays, because on lesson based compensation that question decides a surprising share of your monthly income.

How does Novakid compare with the platforms people weigh it against?

Novakid sits at the strict end. The table below puts its published position beside three platforms it is routinely compared with, using each company’s own wording rather than recruiter summaries.

That pattern is not confined to these four. Our Hire Wire briefing checked eight online teaching platforms against their own pages and found that only one of them publishes what online English teaching platforms actually pay, with three publishing a commission percentage instead and four publishing nothing at all. The online English teaching pay rates by platform desk keeps those published rates and commissions current and converts them to euro.

Read that table as a trade. The platforms with no entry requirements publish low fixed rates and put you in a large pool. Novakid asks for a certificate and for children specific experience, and in exchange you are applying against fewer people, but you go in without knowing the number.

If you want the wider comparison first, our guide to the best platforms to teach English online covers adult, business and exam work alongside young learner teaching. For the two platforms in the table above that we cover in depth, see our Cambly review and our guide to teaching English online with NativeCamp.

What does the Novakid application actually involve?

More paperwork than most platforms, collected in a single form rather than spread across stages. Knowing the list in advance is the difference between a twenty minute application and an abandoned one.

1. Contact details. Personal email address, phone number and country of residence.
2. Photograph. Uploaded as PNG, JPG or JPEG.
3. CV. Uploaded as PDF, DOC, DOCX, JPEG or PNG.
4. Legal name. Exactly as it appears on your identity document or passport.
5. Identity verification. Supporting documents uploaded directly.
6. Citizenship and residence. Stated, with supporting documents.
7. Date of birth.
8. Educational qualification. Your degree or diploma, uploaded.
9. Teaching certificates. Marked optional at upload, although the role listing states a certificate is required, so upload it.
10. Teaching experience questions. This is where the six months with children is tested.
11. Video introduction. Thirty to sixty seconds.
12. Consent. Legal terms and data processing.

Two of those deserve preparation rather than improvisation. The video introduction is short enough that a rambling start wastes a third of it, so lead with who you teach and what you are qualified in. And step nine is a trap of wording rather than intent: the upload field is optional, the job is not, and an application without the certificate attached is an application that has to be chased.

Does Novakid hire teachers outside the usual countries?

Its recruitment site states that “ESL teachers from 56 countries are already part of our team”, and the Online ESL Teacher listing names no nationality requirement and no native speaker requirement. What it names instead is a C1 English level, which is a proficiency test rather than a passport test.

That distinction matters a great deal in the Philippines, South Africa, Nigeria and across Latin America, where teachers are regularly filtered out of platform work by nationality clauses they only discover after applying. Novakid’s published wording does not contain one.

Take that as an absence of a stated restriction rather than a guarantee of acceptance. Hiring is still selective, and the certificate and experience lines do the filtering instead.

Which certificate should you hold for a platform that checks?

Any of the categories Novakid names will satisfy the line on paper. Where the choice starts to matter is at the verification step, because a platform collecting your certificate as a document is a platform that can be asked to confirm it.

A regulated qualification exists on an external public record, so a company can confirm it independently rather than trusting the file you uploaded. Our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL Diploma is on the Ofqual register as qualification number 610/1571/4, awarded by Highfield Qualifications under Ofqual organisation number RN5219, with 180 guided learning hours and a total qualification time of 382 hours. The separate Level 5 Advanced Diploma is 610/1573/8, with 300 guided learning hours, a total qualification time of 542 hours and 54 credits. Both register entries were confirmed by our team on 26 August 2026. They are two distinct qualifications and should not be quoted as one.

Novakid names TEYL specifically, and that is the specialism this role is actually about. Our 30 Hour Teaching English to Young Learners course is the targeted add on, and on an application that tests children specific experience it is the line that speaks directly to the requirement.

If the acronyms are the thing slowing you down, our reference page on TEFL qualifications and terminology explained sets out what each one means and which employers ask for which. The British Council’s Teaching English in primary course is a useful independent reference for what training for this age group covers.

How do you satisfy the six months with children?

By counting work you have probably already done and describing it precisely. The requirement is six months teaching English to children, and applicants routinely undersell themselves because they are thinking only of salaried classroom posts.

Private tutoring of school age learners counts, and so does a volunteer placement, a summer programme, a teaching practice component completed as part of a certificate course, and classroom assistant work where you led English activities. What matters is that you can state the age group, the dates, how often you taught and what you taught.

Write it in that order on the application. “Eleven months, ages seven to eleven, two hours weekly, phonics and speaking” is answerable. “Experience with kids” is not, and it is the version that gets filtered.

What to watch before you apply

Four things, all avoidable.

An unpublished rate is a real unknown, not a formality. Do not commit hours until you have your own number in writing and know what a cancellation pays.

The optional certificate upload is not optional in substance. The role requires one. Attach it.

Document volume slows people down. Gather your identity papers, diploma and certificate before you open the form rather than halfway through it.

Rates quoted by other teachers are not comparable to yours. They reflect a different market, a different tenure and often a different year.

Where to start

Decide first whether you clear the two screening lines, because everything else on the Novakid form is administration. If you hold a recognised teaching certificate and can evidence six months teaching English to children, you are in the pool that this platform is actually recruiting from, and that pool is smaller than the ones at Cambly and Preply.

If you clear the certificate line but not the experience line, the honest sequence is to build the children specific hours somewhere that does not require them, and to keep a dated record of age groups and contact time while you do it. Our guide to teaching kids English online sets out which platforms hire without that background, and our guide to becoming a Preply tutor covers the marketplace route where you set your own rate while you build reviews.

And if neither line is cleared yet, the young learner specialism is the cheaper and faster of the two to obtain, and it is the one Novakid names by its own acronym.

The post How to Apply to Novakid: Requirements, Process and What It Pays appeared first on TEFL Institute.

You teach kids English online by joining a platform that hires for young learner classes, meeting that platform’s own entry rules, and passing its screening. Requirements vary sharply: Cambly Kids asks for no degree or certificate, while Qkids requires a bachelor’s degree and an English teaching certificate before it will assign you lessons.

Key takeaways

• There is no single industry standard. Each platform sets its own bar, and the gap between the easiest and the strictest is the whole difference between starting this month and not qualifying at all.
• Cambly Kids states plainly that no teaching certificate, degree or prior experience is needed, and publishes a rate of 0.20 US dollars per minute, which works out at 12 US dollars an hour.
• Qkids sits at the other end. It asks for the legal right to work in the United States or Canada, a bachelor’s degree, and a teaching licence or English teaching certificate before lessons are assigned.
• Preply lets tutors set their own price and states that no official qualifications are required, so what you earn there is a pricing decision rather than a fixed rate.
• Children’s classes are a parent-facing product. You are being chosen by an adult who is paying for their child, which changes how bookings, cancellations and repeat lessons work.
• A qualification an employer can look up independently does the work a degree would otherwise do. That is the practical argument for a regulated certificate rather than an unverifiable one.

Teaching children online is one of the few corners of English language teaching where you can be hired quickly, paid modestly and kept busy indefinitely, all at the same time. It is also the corner where the published requirements are least consistent, which is why so much of the advice about it is wrong. What follows is what the platforms themselves say, checked on the day of writing, plus the parts nobody puts on a careers page.

If you want the wider view of the market first, our guide to the best platforms to teach English online covers adult teaching, business English and exam preparation alongside young learner work. And if your interest in children’s classes began with the old Chinese market, our guide to teaching English online to Chinese students explains what replaced it.

What do the main platforms actually require?

Requirements fall into two camps. One group screens on documents, the other screens on your trial lesson. Knowing which camp a platform sits in tells you where to spend your effort.

The table below is taken from each company’s own published pages rather than from job boards or recruiter summaries, which is where most of the misinformation about this market comes from.

How to cite this table. The TEFL Institute, “How to Teach Kids English Online: Platforms, Pay and What They Require”, teflinstitute.com, data checked 1 September 2026. Each figure is attributed to the company that publishes it. Platforms change rates and entry rules without notice, so verify against the company’s own page before applying.

Two things in that table deserve a second look. Cambly pays more for children’s classes than for adult ones, which tells you where demand sits. And Qkids requires a certificate before lessons are assigned, not before you apply, which means people are routinely accepted and then stuck.

What does teaching children online actually pay?

Somewhere between 10 and 20 US dollars an hour on the large platforms, with the top of the range reserved for tutors who set their own price and fill their diary. Anyone quoting 40 dollars an hour as a starting rate is describing a private client, not a platform.

The important number is not the hourly rate, though. It is the rate multiplied by the hours you can actually get, and those two move in opposite directions. Fixed-rate platforms give you predictable pay and unpredictable volume. Marketplaces such as Preply give you control of your price and put the burden of filling your diary on you.

Watch the unit of payment carefully, because it is where advertised pay and real pay separate. A per-minute rate only pays for minutes taught, so gaps between bookings are unpaid. A per-lesson rate pays the same whether the lesson runs long or the child logs off early. A per-hour rate quoted by a marketplace is a price you have set, not a wage anyone has promised you.

Do you need a degree to teach kids English online?

Not for every platform, and this is the single most common misunderstanding in the market. Cambly and Preply both state that no degree is required. Qkids requires one. So the honest answer is that a degree opens more of the market, and its absence closes some doors completely rather than all of them.

Where a degree is not required, something has to take its place in the employer’s decision, and that something is usually evidence that you have been trained and assessed by somebody other than yourself. A certificate a company can look up on a public register carries weight precisely because it does not rely on trusting you. Our guide to becoming a Preply tutor goes through how that plays out on a marketplace where you are competing on a profile rather than passing a checklist.

There is also a passport question sitting quietly underneath this. Qkids asks for the legal right to work in the United States or Canada, which is a nationality and residency filter rather than an educational one. Read entry requirements for that kind of condition before you spend an evening on an application.

How is teaching children online different from teaching adults?

Commercially, it is a different job with the same subject. Four differences matter before you commit.

You are chosen by a parent, not a learner. The person reading your profile is an adult deciding whether to trust you with their child. Photographs, phrasing and a clear statement of what you are qualified in do more work here than they do on adult listings.

Lessons are shorter and more numerous. Children’s classes are commonly booked in short slots, so the same weekly income involves more separate appointments, more transitions and more admin than an equivalent adult timetable.

Retention is the whole business. A child who enjoys the lesson is rebooked weekly for a year, which is why platforms weigh your trial lesson so heavily. A single good trial can be worth more than a strong CV.

Scheduling follows a school day that is not yours. Demand clusters around after-school hours and weekends in the learner’s time zone. If your learners are in East Asia and you are in Ireland or the United Kingdom, the profitable hours are early morning.

What checks do platforms run before you teach children?

Expect identity verification, a recorded or observed trial lesson, and in many cases a background check appropriate to where you live. Platforms that place adults in unsupervised video contact with children have an obvious duty of care, and the serious ones act like it.

Two features are worth understanding as protections rather than as surveillance. Lessons are frequently recorded, which protects the child and also protects you if a complaint is ever made. And parents can often watch or review the class, which is why an off-hand remark in a children’s lesson carries a weight it would not carry with an adult learner.

Child protection standards across Europe are coordinated through the Council of Europe’s children’s rights programme, which covers violence and sexual violence against children and monitors how member states meet those obligations. None of that regulates online tutoring directly, but it is the framework the reputable platforms are drafting their own policies against, and it explains why the screening is heavier than the pay might suggest.

Which qualification makes you hireable for young learner work?

A general English teaching certificate gets you through most doors, and a young learner specialism is what distinguishes you once you are through. Qkids names TESOL, TEFL, CELTA and ESL certificates as acceptable, which tells you the category matters more than the brand.

Where the brand does matter is verification. A regulated qualification exists on an external public record, so a company can confirm the qualification independently of anything you send it. Our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL Diploma is on the Ofqual register as qualification number 610/1571/4, awarded by Highfield Qualifications under Ofqual organisation number RN5219, with 180 guided learning hours and a total qualification time of 382 hours. The separate Level 5 Advanced Diploma is 610/1573/8, with 300 guided learning hours, a total qualification time of 542 hours and 54 credits. Both register entries were confirmed by our team on 26 August 2026. They are two distinct qualifications and should not be quoted as one.

For the young learner specialism itself, our 30 Hour Teaching English to Young Learners course is the targeted add-on, and it is the line on a profile that answers a parent’s actual question about whether you have trained for children specifically.

If you want to understand how the acronyms relate to one another before choosing, our reference page on TEFL qualifications and terminology explained sets out what each one means and which jobs ask for which. The British Council’s own Teaching English in primary course is a useful independent reference point for what training for this age group covers.

How many hours can you realistically get as a beginner?

Few at first, and this is the expectation most new online teachers get wrong. New profiles carry no reviews, no completed lesson count and no rebooking history, which are the three things both parents and platform algorithms use to decide who gets seen.

Plan for a slow first month on any platform. The teachers who fill a diary tend to be the ones who opened unpopular hours early, answered messages quickly, and stayed on one platform long enough to accumulate reviews rather than spreading themselves across four. Treat the first thirty lessons as the cost of entry.

What should you watch out for?

Four things, all of them avoidable if you read before you commit.

Unpaid training and unpaid trial lessons. Some screening is reasonable. A long sequence of unpaid mock classes is a cost, and you should count it.

Requirements that appear after acceptance. The Qkids condition is the clearest published example: a certificate is required before lessons are assigned, so being accepted is not the same as being able to work.

Rates quoted in a unit that flatters them. Per-minute and per-lesson figures are not hourly wages. Convert everything to a realistic hourly figure including unpaid gaps before comparing.

Cancellation policies that fall on you. Find out what happens when a child does not turn up, because on some platforms that is a paid lesson and on others it is an hour of your morning you gave away.

Which route suits which person?

Match yourself to one of four situations rather than applying everywhere at once. Scattergun applications are how people end up with three rejections and no idea which requirement they failed.

You have a degree and a teaching certificate. The whole market is open, including the fixed-rate platforms with published pay and assigned lessons. Start there, because predictable volume while you build reviews is worth more than a higher headline rate you cannot fill.

You have a certificate but no degree. The degree-gated platforms are closed, and that is worth knowing on day one rather than after an application. The platforms screening on a trial lesson are your market, and your certificate is what separates you from the applicants who have nothing.

You have a degree but no certificate. You are one step from the strictest platforms and already eligible for the most relaxed ones. Since a certificate is the cheaper and faster of the two credentials to obtain, this is the situation where training pays back quickest.

You have neither. You can still start. Cambly Kids states no degree, certificate or experience is required, so the door is genuinely open. Understand that you are entering at the lowest published rate in the market and competing on your trial lesson alone, and that a certificate is the normal way out of that bracket.

One route sits outside all four. Teaching private students you find yourself removes the platform’s cut and its rules, but it also removes its payment protection, its scheduling system and its supply of learners. It is a reasonable second stage and a difficult first one.

Where to start

Decide first whether you are competing on documents or on personality, because the platforms sort themselves that way. If you have a degree and a certificate, the stricter fixed-rate platforms are open to you and offer predictable work. If you have neither, the platforms that screen on a trial lesson are the realistic entry point, and a certificate is the fastest way to stop competing on price alone.

Then get the specialism on your profile before you apply rather than after, because the trial lesson is the moment it pays for itself. Our Teaching English to Young Learners course is built for exactly this decision, and it sits alongside the Ofqual regulated Level 5 Diploma for anyone who wants a qualification a company can verify on a public register rather than take on trust.

The post How to Teach Kids English Online: Platforms, Pay and What They Require appeared first on TEFL Institute.

Key takeaways

• Camps run roughly from late June to late August, in sessions of one to three weeks, and hiring happens in late winter and spring
• The package is usually board, lodging and a stipend rather than a salary, so what you save is real even when the headline figure looks small
• They exist because Greek school contracts run September to June, leaving two unpaid months
• The work is half teaching and half supervision, and the second half is what surprises people
• A 120-hour accredited TEFL qualification is the standard ask, and young learner experience matters more than a diploma
• UK and US applicants still need the right to work, and camps sponsor even less often than language schools do

What is a Greek summer English camp?

A residential programme, usually two to eight weeks long, in which Greek children spend part of each day in English lessons and the rest of the day doing sport, swimming, crafts, and evening activities, supervised by the same staff who taught them that morning.

They are run by a mix of organisations. Some are operated by frontistiria chains as a summer extension of their term-time business. Some are run by dedicated camp companies with permanent coastal sites. A smaller number are attached to private schools, and international programmes occasionally place teachers into Greek sites as part of a wider network.

The learners are mostly Greek children and teenagers, aged roughly 8 to 16, usually grouped by age and approximate language level. Numbers per group tend to be small, and the atmosphere is deliberately unlike school, because the parents are paying for a holiday that also happens to improve their child’s English.

Why camps matter more in Greece than elsewhere

Because of a gap the rest of the Greek teaching year creates and does not solve.

Almost every frontistirio contract runs from September to June, and July and August are unpaid. That is the standard shape of the job, and it is the single biggest practical problem teachers face in Greece. Rent continues. Bills continue. Income stops. We go through the arithmetic in detail in our breakdown of the cost of living in Greece for English teachers, and the summer is where most budgets come unstuck.

Camp work answers both halves of that problem at once. It replaces some income, and because board and lodging are usually included, it removes most of your outgoings for the weeks you are there. A teacher who spends July at a camp on Crete is not just earning; they are also not paying for food and, if they give up their flat for the summer, possibly not paying rent either. That combination is why so many teachers in Greece treat camps as part of the annual cycle rather than as a one-off.

When do Greek summer camps hire?

Earlier than you would expect, and the window closes before most people start looking.

Recruitment generally runs from February to May, with the bulk of decisions made in March and April. Camps need staff confirmed before they sell places to parents, and the organisers who run multiple sites want their rotas settled well in advance. By the time the term ends in June, most positions are filled, and what remains is late-replacement hiring, which does happen but is not part of the plan.

Sessions themselves usually start in the last week of June and run through August, sometimes into the first days of September. Many camps hire for the whole season, some for a single session, and a few will take you for a fortnight if that is all you can give. If you are already teaching in Greece on a term-time contract, tell them in your application that you finish in June and are free from the first day, because availability across the full season is worth more to them than experience.

Where are the camps?

On the coast, almost without exception, because the swimming is half the appeal for the families paying.

The mainland concentration is in Halkidiki, the three-fingered peninsula south of Thessaloniki, which has the density of coastal resorts and the proximity to a major city that camp operators want. The Peloponnese coast, Pelion and parts of the western mainland also host programmes. Among the islands, Crete, Rhodes and Corfu run the largest operations, being big enough to support permanent sites and well connected enough for staff and children to reach.

A smaller number of camps run inland, in mountain settings in Epirus and central Greece, built around hiking and outdoor pursuits rather than the sea. They are quieter, often cheaper for parents, and they tend to have less competition among applicants.

Location affects your summer more than the pay does. A coastal site means beach afternoons and a lively staff social life. An inland site means cooler nights and fewer distractions. Neither is better, but they are genuinely different jobs.

What do summer camps in Greece pay?

Modestly in cash, and considerably better than the cash figure suggests once you account for what you are not spending.

The standard package is accommodation, all meals and a stipend. Accommodation is usually shared staff rooms or on-site cabins. Meals are eaten with the children, which is part of the job rather than a perk. The stipend varies widely by operator, whether you are a teacher or an activity leader, and how long you commit for; figures quoted between camps are not comparable until you check what is included.

The question to ask every operator is the same one: what is the stipend, is it per week or per session, and what exactly does it cover. A camp offering less cash with full board and travel can leave you better off than one quoting a bigger number and charging you for the ferry.

What does the work actually involve?

More hours than a school timetable and a different kind of tiredness.

A typical day starts with breakfast alongside the children, moves into two or three teaching sessions throughout the morning, includes a lunch break and a rest period, and then turns into activities, swimming, sport, or excursions throughout the afternoon. Evenings bring organised games, a quiz, a film or a talent show, and then the part nobody puts in the advert: settling a corridor of overexcited eleven-year-olds at eleven at night.

You are a teacher for perhaps three hours and a responsible adult for the other twelve. Safeguarding, supervision, homesickness, minor injuries, lost swimming goggles and the politics of who is sharing a room all become your business. Most camps run a rota so nobody is on duty every evening, but the job is residential, and you are on site.

The teaching itself is deliberately light on paperwork. Lessons are communicative, games-heavy and pitched at keeping children talking rather than covering a syllabus, and materials are usually provided. If you have taught exam classes in a frontistirio all winter, the change of register takes a few days to adjust to.

How is camp work different from classroom teaching?

The obvious difference is the setting. The real difference is that you cannot go home.

In a school you teach, you finish, you leave. At a camp you eat with your students, swim near them in the afternoon and put them to bed. Professional distance has to be maintained deliberately rather than by the timetable doing it for you, and that is a skill in itself. Teachers who find it easiest tend to be the ones who are clear from day one about the boundaries.

The second difference is the staff team. You live with your colleagues for weeks, usually in close quarters, and the quality of that group shapes the summer more than anything the employer does. It is intense, it makes fast friendships, and it occasionally makes fast enemies.

The third is pace. Camps are relentless in a way term time is not. Two weeks is a pleasant break from routine. Eight weeks without a proper rest day is a long time, and it is worth being honest with yourself about which one you are signing up for.

Is a Greek summer camp a good first teaching job?

Yes, and it is one of the most forgiving places to start.

Camps tend to hire people with limited classroom experience because energy, reliability, and being good with children matter as much as technique in that setting. You get a high volume of contact hours in a short period, teach several age groups, and quickly find out whether you actually enjoy being around learners all day. Materials are provided, the stakes are low, and a senior teacher is usually on site.

It is also a sensible way to test Greece before committing to a year. You arrive in June, work a season, and leave in September either with a much better sense of the country and some local contacts, or with the knowledge that it is not for you, having spent very little.

What it is not is a substitute for a term-time contract. The money will not fund a year, and camp experience alone will not satisfy a frontistirio looking for someone to take exam classes. Treat it as an entry point or a bridge, which is what it is.

Can UK and US applicants work at a Greek camp?

Only with the right to work, and camp work is paid work regardless of how informal the arrangement sounds.

If you hold an EU or EEA passport, including an Irish one, this is straightforward. You have freedom of movement, you can take the job, and the administration is registration rather than permission.

If you hold a UK, US, Canadian or Australian passport, you are a third-country national, and the same constraint applies to camps as to schools. A ninety-day visitor entry allows you to be in Greece but not to work there, and it is counted across the whole Schengen area. Camps sponsor even less often than frontistiria, because the engagement is short, seasonal and small, and the paperwork does not fit the timescale. The routes that do work are set out in full in our guide to teaching English in Greece without an EU passport, and for EU and EEA citizens the official position on working in another member state is on the Your Europe portal.

There is one funded exception worth knowing for Americans. The Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award in Greece places a US graduate at Athens College, and the role explicitly includes working as a counsellor at the school’s English summer camp in June and July. The Fulbright US Student Program’s Greece page lists a national deadline of 6 October 2026 for the 2027 to 2028 year. Check the official page for the current cycle before relying on any date.

How do you actually get a camp job?

Apply directly, apply early, and lead with the two things they are actually screening for.

Camp operators advertise on their own sites, through the frontistiria networks they are connected to, and on the Greek teaching groups where term-time vacancies also circulate. Direct approaches work well because the sector is small and many operators never advertise widely. Write in February or March, name the sessions you can cover, and attach your certificate rather than promising it.

What they screen for, in order, is whether you can be trusted with children and whether you will still be functioning in week six. Everything else is secondary. So put your safeguarding training, any youth work, coaching, scouting, or childcare experience, and your teaching qualification high in the letter, alongside your teaching qualification. Mention any activity skill you can lead, because a teacher who can also run football, drama, swimming or art is worth two who cannot.

Expect a video interview rather than a trial lesson, and expect questions about scenarios rather than methodology. Ask your own questions too: how many children per staff member, what the duty rota looks like, whether the stipend is per week or per session, and what happens if a child is ill at two in the morning. The answers tell you a great deal about the operator. If you want the wider picture of how hiring works across the Greek market, our step-by-step guide to getting an English teaching job in Greece covers the term-time process.

Ready to qualify for a summer camp job in Greece?

For camp work specifically, the qualification that fits is the accredited 120 Hour TEFL Course. It is the international standard that level camps and private language schools ask for; it can be completed in around four weeks alongside other commitments, and it is the right answer if you are aiming for a June start rather than a career in international schools. It also comes bundled with our 30-hour Teach Young Learners course, which is the single most relevant add-on for camp work, since almost every camper is a child or teenager.

If you are planning a term-time contract afterwards, or aiming at better-paid roles later, the Ofqual-regulated Level 5 TEFL course sits above it on the public register as 610/1571/4 and can be checked on the Ofqual register. Most teachers start with the 120-hour certificate and add the diploma later. For the full picture of pay, cities and legal requirements, read our complete guide to teaching English in Greece.

Olivia Klimczyk

Marketing Executive at The TEFL Institute Group and the creative heart of our social media. A marketing graduate who keeps students up to date through newsletters, blogs and reels.

Reviewed 20 September 2026. Camp packages, session dates and stipends vary widely by operator and are described here as typical patterns rather than quoted terms. Confirm details directly with the camp, and confirm your right to work before accepting any paid role.

The post Summer English Camps in Greece: Jobs, Pay and How to Apply appeared first on TEFL Institute.

Key takeaways

• A one bedroom flat commonly runs about 400 to 600 euro a month outside central Athens, and noticeably less in Thessaloniki and the mid sized cities
• Food, transport and eating out are all well below UK and Irish prices, which is what makes a modest salary workable
• Island rents spike hard in summer, and short winter lets can end abruptly in May
• Most frontistiria contracts run September to June, so you need to budget across ten months of income rather than twelve
• Private tutoring at 15 to 25 euro an hour is the difference between surviving and saving, and most established teachers do it
• All figures here are approximate typical ranges, not quotes, and vary by city, season and landlord

What does a month in Greece actually cost?

Enough that you will live comfortably, not enough that you will bank much from a school contract alone. That is the honest headline, and it is the same answer experienced teachers give when new arrivals ask.

The useful way to think about it is that Greece is cheap in the places that recur daily and normal in the places that recur monthly. A coffee, a meal out, a bus fare and a bag of groceries all cost visibly less than in Dublin, London or New York. Rent in a popular Athens neighbourhood and a winter electricity bill do not feel cheap at all, and they are where most teachers get caught out.

Add rent to that, and you have your number. For a single teacher in a mid-sized city, total monthly outgoings typically range from 700 to 950 euros. In central Athens, assume 1,000 to 1,200 and plan accordingly.

How much is rent in Athens, Thessaloniki and the smaller cities?

Rent is the single line that decides whether a Greek teaching salary feels generous or tight, and the spread across the country is wide enough to change your whole experience of the job.

In central Athens neighbourhoods, a one-bedroom flat will often ask 550 to 800 euros a month, and more in the areas teachers gravitate to. Move out to the suburbs and the outer metro area, and the same flat commonly drops to 400 to 550. Thessaloniki, which has a large student population and a high concentration of language schools, generally runs cheaper, with one-bedroom flats frequently in the 350 to 500 range.

The mid-sized cities are where the arithmetic turns genuinely comfortable. In places like Patras, Larissa, Ioannina or Volos, teachers regularly report 300 to 450 euros for a decent one-bedroom. On a frontistirio salary, that leaves real breathing room, and competition for teaching posts is thinner too, which is the argument for looking beyond the two big cities in the first place.

Two practical notes. Flatsharing is less established in Greece than in Spain or Italy, so do not assume you will halve your rent that way outside the student districts. And most landlords will want a deposit of one to two months plus the first month up front, so arrive with more cash than you think you need.

Why do island rents behave differently?

Because on an island you are not competing with other residents for a flat, you are competing with tourism.

Winter lets on the popular islands can be startlingly cheap, and a teacher arriving in October may be delighted with what they find. The catch arrives in spring. Many winter lets are priced precisely because the owner intends to put the property on the holiday market from May or June, and the lease ends accordingly. Summer rates on Crete, Rhodes, Corfu and the Cyclades can be two or three times the winter figure, and in August they bear no relation to a teaching wage at all.

If island life is the reason you are going, ask one question before you sign anything: is this a twelve-month lease? If the answer is vague, plan to move in the spring and factor the cost of that move into your budget. Teachers who do this deliberately manage it well. Teachers who discover it in April do not.

What do utilities and connectivity really cost?

Electricity is the bill that surprises people, and it surprises them more in winter than in summer.

Greek flats are built for heat, not for cold, and a great many have poor insulation and electric heating rather than central heating. A January electricity bill in a draughty older flat can run well past 150 euros, while the same flat in October costs a third of that. Ask what the heating system is before you take a place, and ask to see a previous winter bill if you can. A flat with gas central heating or a heat pump will usually cost less to run than one with electric convectors, whatever the rent difference suggests.

Water and building charges, the koinochrista, are often billed separately and cover shared lighting, cleaning and sometimes communal heating. They are modest, usually 20 to 50 euro a month, but they are real and new arrivals routinely forget to budget for them.

Mobile and broadband are straightforward. A home fibre connection plus a mobile plan with a reasonable data allowance will generally land between 30 and 50 euro a month combined, and prepaid mobile plans are easy to set up before you have a residence permit or a tax number.

How much should you budget for food?

Less than you are used to, and the gap widens if you shop the way Greeks shop.

A single teacher cooking most meals at home will typically spend 180 to 250 euro a month on groceries. The weekly street market, the laiki agora, is where that figure drops: fruit, vegetables and fish are cheaper and better there than in the supermarkets, and going late in the morning gets you the best prices of the day. Olive oil, pulses, seasonal vegetables and bread are all inexpensive. Imported items, branded cereals and anything that had to travel are where Greek supermarket prices stop being a bargain.

Eating out is the genuine pleasure of the budget. A gyros costs a few euros, a coffee sitting down costs three to four euros, and a full meal with wine at a neighbourhood taverna commonly lands between 12 and 20 euros a head. That is why teachers on modest salaries in Greece report a social life that would be unaffordable on the same money in London or Dublin. It is also why the eating-out line quietly doubles if you are not watching it.

What does getting around cost?

Very little, provided you stay in a city with a transport network.

Athens has a monthly pass covering metro, bus, tram and trolley, generally around 30 euros, with a reduced rate for those who qualify. Thessaloniki runs on buses and costs less again. In smaller cities most teachers walk or cycle to work, because the frontistirio you teach in is often in the neighbourhood you live in, and that is one of the quiet advantages of the job.

Inter city travel is where costs appear. Ferries to the islands are seasonal and not cheap in summer, and the domestic flight network is efficient rather than inexpensive. If your plan involves regular island hopping, budget for it separately rather than assuming it fits inside a normal month.

A worked monthly budget on a frontistirio salary

Figures below assume a single teacher on a full-time school contract in a mid-sized Greek city, taking home the lower to middle part of the typical range.

That is the point of the exercise. On the school contract alone, in an average month, a teacher living normally is close to breaking even and can easily slip into the red. Nothing in that budget is extravagant. It simply shows why almost nobody in Greece teaches on the contract alone.

The ten-month problem nobody mentions

Most frontistiria contracts run from September to June, and July and August are unpaid.

This is the single most important thing in this article, and it is routinely left out of cost-of-living guides, which quietly assume twelve months of income against twelve months of costs. Your rent does not pause in July. Your bills do not pause. What pauses is your salary.

There are three standard answers, and most teachers use some combination. Summer camp work, which is concentrated along the coast and on islands from June to August and often includes accommodation and meals, removes both the income and rent problems at once. Keeping private students through the summer is easier than it sounds, because exam retakes and September resits create real demand. Or setting aside roughly 100 to 150 euros a month across the ten paid months, which is the least pleasant option and the one that works no matter what else happens.

Plan for this before you sign a contract, not in May. Teachers who leave Greece after one year usually cite the summer rather than the salary.

How much does tutoring change the picture?

Substantially, and that is not a rounding adjustment. It is the actual economics of the job.

Private tutoring in Greece commonly pays 15 to 25 euros an hour, with the higher end for exam preparation, and Greek families invest heavily in English certification for their children. Six hours a week at 20 euros adds roughly 480 euros a month, which converts the budget above from a small deficit into a comfortable surplus. Ten hours a week, which is a realistic load alongside an afternoon timetable, changes your situation entirely.

The work tends to find you rather than the other way round. Parents at your school ask, one recommends another, and within a term most teachers have as much as they want. That is one more argument for the smaller cities, where you become a known quantity faster than you would among the hundreds of foreign teachers in Athens.

Check your contract permits it before you start, since it generally does, and be aware that declared tutoring income has tax and insurance implications you should take local advice on.

So is a Greek teaching salary enough?

Yes, with two conditions attached, and no if you ignore them.

The first condition is that you treat the tutoring as part of the job rather than as an optional extra. The second is that you budget across ten months rather than twelve. Teachers who do both live well in Greece, travel domestically, eat out regularly and put a little aside. Teachers who do neither find themselves stretched by February and disillusioned by May, which is a shame, because the problem was arithmetic rather than the country.

Compared with its neighbours, Greece sits lower on pay than Spain or Italy, and lower on cost too; the net position outside the big cities is broadly similar. Our breakdown of the cost of living in Spain for English teachers is a useful comparison if you are weighing the two, and you can compare headline pay across markets on the TEFL Salary Index.

For current national price and inflation data rather than typical ranges, the Hellenic Statistical Authority publishes the official consumer price index, and Eurostat publishes comparative price levels across EU countries, which is the fairest way to sense-check any figure you read on a blog, including this one.

Ready to qualify for a teaching job in Greece?

The budget above assumes you have a contract that starts with a qualification a school can verify. Our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL course is listed on the public register as 610/1571/4 and can be checked on the Ofqual register before an employer even interviews you. If you are still working out whether you can legally take a classroom job, read teaching English in Greece without an EU passport first, then follow the step-by-step guide to getting an English teaching job in Greece. The wider picture of pay, cities and requirements is in our full guide to teaching English in Greece.

Reviewed 20 September 2026. All costs are approximate typical ranges gathered from teacher reports and market observations, not quoted prices, and they vary by season, city, and landlord. Confirm current figures locally before budgeting.

The post Cost of Living in Greece for English Teachers: A Full Budget Breakdown appeared first on TEFL Institute.

Key takeaways

• Frontistiria are the market. Thousands of small private language schools do the bulk of the hiring
• The real hiring window is mid August to early October, with a smaller second round in January
• Being physically in Greece during that window converts far better than applying from abroad
• Speculative applications land best in March to May, when schools are planning September
• Expect a trial lesson rather than a formal interview process
• If you hold a UK, US, Canadian or Australian passport, your right to work is the first problem to solve, not the last

Step one: settle your right to work

Nothing else matters until this is resolved, and skipping it is the most common way people waste a summer.

UK, US and other non EU passport holders. You are a third country national in Greece, which means you need an employer willing to sponsor you and a national long stay visa before you can legally teach. Small language schools rarely take that on. In practice the routes that work are international schools, the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award for US graduates, online teaching, or an EU passport through ancestry. We cover all of these in detail in our guide to teaching English in Greece without an EU passport, and it is worth reading before you apply for anything.

EU and EEA passport holders. You have freedom of movement. No visa, no permit, no sponsorship. You register locally, get a Greek tax number known as the AFM and a social insurance number, and that is administration rather than permission. Say so explicitly in your first line to a school, because it is the single thing they most want to know.

Work out which of these you are before you start applying, rather than after twenty unanswered emails. The rest of this guide assumes the question is settled.

Step two: get the qualification sorted early

A TEFL certificate of at least 120 hours is the practical baseline for a contracted role, and a bachelor’s degree in any subject is expected by most schools.

Two details make a difference in this market. The first is regulation. School owners are increasingly aware of the gap between a certificate accredited by a body the course provider owns and one that is externally regulated and independently checkable. Our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL course carries qualification number 610/1571/4 and can be verified on the Ofqual public register, and the distinction is explained fully in our guide to accredited versus regulated TEFL certification. When two applications look similar, verifiable wins.

The second is specialism. A large share of frontistiria teaching is exam preparation for Cambridge and Michigan qualifications, so any evidence you can teach toward those moves you up the pile.

Step three: understand the hiring calendar

Greece runs on a tight annual rhythm and applying at the wrong point in it is the difference between a reply and silence.

The pattern to notice is that the planning happens in spring and the deciding happens in late summer. Applying in spring puts your name in front of an owner who is thinking ahead. Being present in September puts you in front of one who needs a teacher this week.

US graduates have a separate calendar to watch. The Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award in Greece runs on the national Fulbright cycle, and the Fulbright US Student Program’s Greece page lists a deadline of 6 October 2026 for the 2027 to 2028 year. That is roughly eleven months ahead of the start date, so it needs planning a full cycle earlier than a frontistirio job.

Step four: know who you are applying to

Frontistiria. Private language schools, thousands of them, scattered through every city and most sizeable towns. Small classes, students from young children to adults, heavy on exam preparation. This is where nearly every teacher starts and where nearly all the vacancies are.

Summer camps. June to August, mainly coastal and island, English combined with activities. Often the easiest first foot in the door, and a useful bridge across the unpaid summer that a term time contract leaves you with.

International schools. Athens and Thessaloniki mostly, far better paid, but they hire licensed schoolteachers rather than TEFL certified teachers. Worth targeting only if you have qualified teacher status. These are also the employers most likely to have sponsored a visa before.

Private tutoring. Not a job you apply for, but a substantial part of most teachers’ income once they are established. It grows through word of mouth from the parents at your school.

Universities and public schools. Difficult to enter, usually requiring Greek language ability and local teaching credentials. Do not build a plan around them.

Step five: write an application a school owner will read

These are small businesses and the person reading your email is usually the owner, between lessons, on a phone. Long personal essays about your love of the Mediterranean do not survive that context.

Lead with your right to work. Then your qualification, its hours and whether it is regulated. Then your degree. Then what you can teach, naming exam boards if you can. Then your availability, with actual dates. Then where you are willing to live, and say yes to more than Athens if you can, because the competition thins dramatically outside it.

Keep the CV to one page with a photo, which is normal and expected in Greece and catches a lot of British and American applicants by surprise. Attach your certificate as a PDF rather than promising it on request. If you are already in the country, put that in the subject line, because it changes how the email is read.

Step six: prepare for the trial lesson

Greek hiring leans on demonstration rather than interview. Expect to be asked to teach a short lesson, sometimes to a real class, sometimes to staff pretending to be one, sometimes at very short notice.

Have one adaptable lesson ready to go for a mixed level teenage class, which is the most common scenario. Bring your own materials. Keep the teacher talking time low and get the students producing language early, because that is what an experienced owner is watching for. Ask what the class is working toward, since if the answer is a Cambridge exam then your lesson should visibly point at it.

Step seven: check the contract before you agree

Most contracts run September to June for one academic year and are renewable. Full time pay in a language school is typically somewhere around 900 to 1,400 euro gross a month, with hourly work commonly 10 to 15 euro. Both are approximate ranges rather than fixed rates, and you can compare them against other markets on our TEFL Salary Index.

Points to clarify before signing. Whether the pay is gross or net, and whether social insurance contributions are being properly registered. How many teaching hours the salary covers, and what happens beyond them. Whether July and August are paid, because usually they are not and you need to plan for a ten month income. Whether travel between branches is expected. And whether private tutoring on the side is permitted, since it generally is but you want that clear.

What does the teaching week actually look like?

Worth knowing before you sign, because the shape of a frontistirio week surprises people who have only taught in a school.

Your hours are the afternoons and evenings. Greek children attend state school in the morning and come to the language school afterwards, so a typical timetable runs from roughly three in the afternoon to nine or ten at night, Monday to Friday, with Saturday mornings common for exam groups. That is a genuine lifestyle change rather than a detail. It frees your mornings completely, which is why so many teachers build private tutoring or online hours into that gap, and it means your social life runs on Greek time rather than an office one.

Class sizes are small, often six to twelve students, and you will usually hold the same groups all year. Levels run from young children starting out to adults preparing for proficiency exams, and most teachers carry a spread of both in one timetable. The curriculum is generally set by the school and built around a coursebook, so you are delivering a planned syllabus rather than designing one, which is a relief in a first year and a constraint in a third.

The exam pressure is real and it is the defining feature of the market. Greek families invest heavily in English certification, and the Cambridge and Michigan exams are the reason most students are in the room. Your results matter to the owner in a way that is more direct than in most markets, because parents talk and the school’s reputation in the neighbourhood is built on pass rates. Teachers who take that seriously get renewed and recommended.

Meet the founder

Ian O’Sullivan, The TEFL Institute Group

Ian founded the group in 2017 to bring honesty to TEFL training, after twenty years in the field. The Institute is Europe’s largest TEFL trainer by teachers certified, with 161,000 teachers certified and graduates now teaching in 80 countries.

About The TEFL Institute Group

Which cities give you the best odds?

Athens holds roughly half the market by volume and also half the competition, so it is the easiest place to find vacancies and the hardest place to stand out in. If you have no contacts and no Greek, it is still the sensible first target, because the sheer number of schools means somebody is short a teacher in September.

Thessaloniki is the quieter version of the same bet. A large student city with a real concentration of schools, noticeably cheaper rent, and fewer foreign applicants competing for each post. Several teachers who struggle in Athens find work in a fortnight after moving north.

The mid sized cities are where the odds genuinely shift. Patras, Larissa, Ioannina, Volos and Heraklion all have working frontistiria networks and receive a fraction of the speculative applications. A school in a town that rarely sees a qualified native speaker applicant will often make time for one, and the cost of living difference means a lower salary goes further. The trade is a smaller English speaking community and more reliance on your own resourcefulness.

The islands are a separate case. Year round teaching work exists on the larger ones, Crete and Rhodes in particular, but on smaller islands the population does not support a full timetable and the work is seasonal. Teachers who want island life usually combine summer camp work with a term time contract somewhere else, or teach online alongside a smaller local roster.

If you are flexible about location, say so in your first email. It is the single line most likely to get a reply, because it answers the question every owner outside Athens is quietly asking.

Where to look

Walking in works in Greece in a way it does not in most markets. During the hiring window, printing twenty CVs and visiting schools in person in one neighbourhood will typically outperform a hundred emails. Beyond that, use Greek job boards and school networks, local Facebook groups for English teachers in Athens and Thessaloniki, and direct approaches to school websites, which almost all list a contact address.

One habit that pays off. Keep a simple record of who you contacted and when, and follow up once in early September. A polite second email arriving in the week a teacher drops out is how a lot of people get hired.

A realistic timeline

• Now to March. Complete a regulated TEFL qualification, settle your right to work, and prepare your CV
• March to May. Speculative applications, targeting more than one city
• June to July. Expect quiet. Arrange accommodation and travel
• Mid August. Arrive if you can. Begin in person visits and follow ups
• September. Trial lessons, offers, contract checks, start date

Before you accept an offer, work the numbers with our breakdown of the cost of living in Greece for English teachers, and plan the unpaid summer with our guide to summer English camp jobs in Greece. For the fuller picture of cities and legal requirements, read our complete guide to teaching English in Greece, check entry rules for other destinations on the Visa Desk, or browse other countries on the Teach English Abroad hub.

Ready to apply for your first Greek classroom?

A school owner reading twenty applications in September is looking for the one they can verify quickly. Our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL course appears on the public register as 610/1571/4, and the 120 Hour Advanced TEFL Course covers the standard 120 hour requirement if you want to be ready for the spring application window. The TEFL Institute Group has certified 161,000 teachers since 2017, now teaching in 80 countries, and every certificate carries a reference an employer can check before they interview you.

Olivia Klimczyk

Marketing Executive at The TEFL Institute Group and the creative heart of our social media. A marketing graduate who keeps students up to date through newsletters, blogs and reels.

Reviewed 19 September 2026. Pay figures are approximate typical ranges, and programme deadlines change annually. Confirm current details with the employer and with official programme pages before making plans.

The post How to Get an English Teaching Job in Greece: A Step by Step Guide appeared first on TEFL Institute.

Key takeaways

• UK citizens lost freedom of movement on 1 January 2021 and now sit in the same legal bracket as US, Canadian and Australian applicants
• Most frontistiria, the private language schools that dominate the market, will not sponsor, because the cost and admin fall on them
• The 90 day visa free stay lets you visit and interview, but not work, and it is counted across the whole Schengen area
• US graduates have a dedicated route the UK does not: the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award at Athens College, with a national deadline of 6 October 2026 for the 2027 to 2028 year
• International schools, the digital nomad visa and online teaching are the realistic remaining options
• A regulated qualification matters more than it used to, because you now need to be the candidate worth the paperwork

Why UK and US teachers are in the same position

Greek immigration law divides the world into two groups, and the line is not about language or ability. EU and EEA citizens have freedom of movement and can simply turn up and work. Everybody else is a third country national and needs permission that an employer has to obtain on their behalf.

US citizens have always been on the outside of that line. UK citizens joined them on 1 January 2021. That is the whole change, and it is why a great deal of the advice still circulating online, written when a British passport was an EU passport, is now actively misleading.

Greece has not singled anyone out. It applies a standard framework built on the assumption that an employer wants a specific foreign worker enough to prove it. If you lived in Greece before the cutoff as a UK citizen and registered under the Withdrawal Agreement, your rights were protected and none of this applies to you.

What you can and cannot do on a visitor stay

UK and US citizens can both enter Greece without a visa for up to 90 days in any rolling 180 day period. That covers holidays, house hunting, interviews and trial lessons. It does not cover paid work of any kind, including a handful of private students paid in cash.

Two practical points people underestimate. The allowance is counted across the entire Schengen area, not Greece alone, so a week in Italy eats into the same 90 days. And entry and exit stamps make an overstay visible in a way it was not a decade ago. The old approach of arriving, finding work and quietly sorting the paperwork later has largely stopped working, and school owners know it.

The visa route that does exist

The legal path runs in one direction and the order matters.

1. A Greek employer offers you a role and agrees to sponsor you
2. The employer applies to the Greek authorities for approval to hire a third country national, which involves showing the role could not readily be filled from within the EU labour market
3. Once approved, you apply for a national long stay visa, commonly called a type D visa, at the Greek consulate covering where you live
4. You enter Greece on that visa and apply for a residence permit tied to that employment

You cannot begin this from inside Greece as a visitor, and you cannot begin it without a named employer. That last point is the whole difficulty, because it puts the burden on a small business with cheaper options. Requirements and consular processing times differ between the London and the US consulates, so check the guidance published by the Greek consulate covering your own address rather than a general summary.

Why frontistiria rarely sponsor

Greece has thousands of private language schools and they are the overwhelming bulk of the English teaching market. Almost all are small owner run businesses with a handful of staff, tight margins and a September deadline.

Sponsorship asks such a school to take on a cost, a bureaucratic process in a system not known for speed, and a delay of weeks or months, at exactly the point in the year when they need someone in a classroom. Set against that, they have a pool of Greek teachers, EU teachers and already resident foreign teachers who can start immediately with no paperwork at all. It is not prejudice, it is arithmetic, and it is the single biggest reason applications from outside the EU get polite silence rather than rejection.

The honest summary: if your plan is to email fifty frontistiria from London or Chicago and hope one sponsors you, the success rate will be close to zero. The routes that work are the ones where the employer is large enough to have done this before, or where somebody else carries the paperwork.

The routes that still work

The Fulbright route, for US applicants

This is the clearest funded way into a Greek classroom for an American, and it is badly under-known. The Fulbright US Student Program runs an English Teaching Assistant award in Greece, placing a grantee at Athens College, part of the Hellenic American Educational Foundation, for the academic year.

The award is open to recent US bachelor’s and master’s graduates with a strong academic record. Majors in education and in English language and literature, including TESOL and TEFL, are given priority, though applicants from other fields are encouraged. Grantees assist in English classes, mentor in the school’s Forensics Club, and work as counsellors at the school’s English summer camp in June and July.

The timing is the part to act on. The Fulbright US Student Program’s Greece page lists the 2027 to 2028 national deadline as 6 October 2026, and applications go through Fulbright Greece and your campus Fulbright adviser. If you are a US graduate reading this in the autumn, that deadline is the single most useful date in this article. Check both official pages for the current cycle, because dates and placement details change annually.

The citizenship by descent route

For a sizeable minority of UK and US readers, ancestry solves the problem outright. An EU passport restores freedom of movement completely: no sponsorship, no type D visa, no employer paperwork, and a job hunt that works the way it did for British teachers before 2021.

Ireland and Italy are the two most commonly used routes among British and American applicants, and Poland, Greece itself, Portugal, Hungary and others all have descent provisions. The rules differ sharply between them, generally on how many generations back you can go and what documentation survives. If you have a European born parent or grandparent, this is worth investigating before you write a single speculative email, because the application timelines run to months or years rather than weeks.

The digital nomad option

Greece runs a digital nomad visa for people earning remotely from employers or clients based outside Greece. It carries a minimum monthly income requirement and proof obligations, and it explicitly does not permit working for a Greek employer. Check the current threshold with the Greek consulate covering your address, since it is revised periodically and a figure quoted on a blog is not something to plan a move around.

For a teacher, that means it can support online teaching to students abroad while you live in Greece. It cannot be quietly converted into a classroom job at a local school. Used honestly, it is a legitimate way to spend a year in Athens or on an island while teaching online.

How to be worth the paperwork

If you are pursuing the sponsored route, the calculation you need to change is the employer’s. They are being asked to do extra work for you specifically, so the question in their mind is what you bring that a local hire does not.

What genuinely helps. A regulated qualification rather than an unaccredited certificate, because it can be verified independently instead of taken on trust: our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL course carries qualification number 610/1571/4 and is checkable on the Ofqual public register, which is the difference explained in our guide to accredited versus regulated TEFL certification. A specialism in short supply, particularly Cambridge and Michigan exam preparation, business English or young learners. Real classroom experience, including volunteer or online. A willingness to work outside Athens, where competition from other foreign teachers thins dramatically. And applying in spring rather than late August, because sponsorship takes time a school does not have in September.

What does not help. Enthusiasm for Greece, which every applicant has. Vague availability. And a certificate whose accrediting body turns out to be owned by the course provider.

Where does the international school route actually lead?

International schools are the one part of the Greek market that sponsors third country nationals as a matter of routine, because they are large enough to have a human resources function and used enough to the process to budget for it. Athens has the deepest cluster, with a smaller number in Thessaloniki and on Crete, and they run on a different calendar to the language schools, recruiting from roughly January to April for a September start.

The trade is that they want a different candidate. A TEFL qualification on its own will rarely open the door. These schools hire against a teaching licence, a PGCE, QTS or a state equivalent, plus two years or more of classroom experience in a mainstream school. Roles for English as an additional language specialists and learning support staff sit slightly below that bar, and they are the realistic entry point for a strong teacher without a full licence.

Pay is materially better than a frontistirio, often two to three times the local rate, and packages sometimes include health cover and a relocation allowance. Contracts are usually two years. If you are a career changer rather than a qualified teacher, the honest read is that this route is a three to five year plan rather than a next September plan, and the sensible first step is to teach somewhere that will take you now while you work towards a licence.

A realistic timeline, from decision to classroom

The single most common mistake is starting in August. Sponsored routes run on consular and ministry timelines that do not compress, so working backwards from a September start is the only version of this plan that survives contact with reality.

Twelve months out, settle the legal question. Check whether you have a claim to an EU passport through a parent or grandparent, because that answer changes everything else, and start the application immediately if you do. US graduates should mark the Fulbright deadline now, since the application involves references and a project statement rather than a form filled in an afternoon.

Nine to six months out, qualify. A regulated course takes weeks rather than days if you want to do it properly, and you want the certificate in hand before you approach anyone, not promised. This is also the window for a specialism, because exam preparation and young learner training are what make a school pause over your application.

Five to three months out, apply. Spring is when a school still has time to consider an unusual hire. Write to named schools rather than posting into job boards, say plainly that you need sponsorship, and make the case for why you are worth it in the first two lines rather than the last.

Two months out, prepare the paperwork. Consular requirements vary, documents need apostilles, and a legalised degree copy takes longer than anyone expects. Teachers who miss a September start usually miss it here, not at the application stage.

What this means in practice

Greece has moved from an easy first destination to a considered one for anyone without an EU passport. That is a real change and it is not worth pretending otherwise. But it has not closed. Americans go through Fulbright. Teachers with EU rights through ancestry go the straightforward way. Others build an online income and live there legally, or go through international schools.

What no longer works is the improvised version: arrive, find something, sort it out later. Plan the legal route first and the teaching second, and Greece is still very much on the table.

If the summer gap is what worries you, see our guide to summer English camp jobs in Greece, and for the monthly arithmetic, the cost of living in Greece for English teachers. Once the legal question is settled, our step by step guide to getting an English teaching job in Greece covers the hiring calendar, the trial lesson and what to check in a contract. For pay, cities and the wider picture of the market, read our full guide to teaching English in Greece, compare earnings across countries on the TEFL Salary Index, and check entry rules for other destinations on the Visa Desk.

Ready to qualify for a teaching job in Greece?

A Greek employer weighing up sponsorship wants a qualification they can check, so start with one that carries a number. Our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL course is listed on the public register as 610/1571/4, and the 120 Hour Advanced TEFL Course meets the standard entry requirement for private language school work if you are starting out. The TEFL Institute Group is Europe’s largest TEFL trainer by teachers certified, with 161,000 teachers certified since 2017 now teaching in 80 countries, and every certificate carries a reference an employer can verify.

Ian O’Sullivan

Founder of The TEFL Institute Group. Ian started the Institute in 2017 to bring honesty to TEFL training and has spent over twenty years in the field, with 161,000 graduates now teaching across 80 countries.

Reviewed 19 September 2026. Visa rules, income thresholds and programme deadlines change. Confirm current requirements with the Greek consulate covering your address and with the official programme pages before making plans.

The post Teaching English in Greece Without an EU Passport: UK and US Teachers appeared first on TEFL Institute.

CPD stands for continuing professional development. It is the learning a teacher does after qualifying to keep their practice current and improve it. The CIPD defines it as “learning experiences which help you develop and improve your professional practice”. In English language teaching, CPD is expected by employers rather than required by law.

Key takeaways

• CPD means continuing professional development. It is a habit and a record, not a single qualification you buy once.
• No law requires an English-language teacher to complete CPD, and no TEFL certificate expires if you do not.
• Employers ask for it anyway and increasingly ask to see it in writing.
• The British Council’s CPD Framework for teachers sets out eleven professional practices, which is the clearest published answer to what counts as CPD in this field.
• “CPD accredited” is a private commercial description. It is not the same as a regulated qualification with a level and a number on a public register.
• The useful record is specific: what you did, when, how long it took, and what changed in your teaching afterwards.

What Does CPD Stand For, and Who Uses the Term?

CPD stands for continuing professional development. Some employers write it as “continuous professional development,” and the two phrases mean the same thing in practice.

The term travels well beyond teaching. Engineers, accountants, nurses, solicitors and surveyors all use it, and in several of those fields a professional body sets a minimum number of hours each year. Teaching English is not one of those fields; it is the single most important thing to understand about CPD in TEFL, and the reason so much of the advice online does not apply.

The CIPD, the chartered professional body for people development in the UK, defines CPD as “learning experiences which help you develop and improve your professional practice”. Its framing is deliberately broad: “All learning that helps you to change and improve your practice is CPD”, whether that is “a conversation with a colleague, doing a new piece of work, working in a new team, taking a course, reading something on LinkedIn, or simply reflecting on the last few months of your work”.

That breadth is the point, and it is also where teachers get stuck. If everything counts, how do you show an employer any of it? The rest of this page is about answering that.

Is CPD Needed to Keep a TEFL Certificate Valid?

No. This is worth stating plainly because the opposite is implied by much course marketing.

A TEFL qualification does not expire; there is no renewal fee, and no CPD is required to keep the certificate you already hold. Our separate guide to whether a TEFL certificate expires goes through the detail, including what employers actually check.

What changes over time is not the certificate. It is the gap between the date on it and today. An employer looking at a qualification earned eight years ago, with nothing since and no recent teaching, is entitled to wonder whether your practice has kept pace. CPD is how you answer that question before it is asked, and it is a far cheaper answer than retaking a full course.

So the honest position is this. CPD is optional in the sense that nothing lapses without it, and close to necessary in the sense that a teacher who cannot describe any learning since their initial course is at a disadvantage against one who can.

What Counts as CPD in English Language Teaching?

This is where the general CPD advice runs out, and something field-specific is needed.

The British Council publishes a Continuing Professional Development Framework for teachers, and it is the most useful published answer we know of. In its own words, the framework “describes the professional practices that are considered relevant, along with professional qualifications, to promoting good teaching across contexts, particularly in public sector primary and secondary schools”. It is “intended for English language teachers and subject teachers who teach through the medium of English”, and can also be used “by teacher educators and school leaders in their support of teachers”.

It names eleven professional practices. Read them as a menu rather than a checklist: they are the areas in which an English-language teacher can sensibly develop, and naming the one you worked on turns a vague claim into a credible one.

The framework also grades development rather than treating it as a single event. British Council professional development resources are filtered across four levels, described as Awareness, Understanding, Engagement and Integration, and the progression is exactly the one an employer cares about: knowing a thing exists is not the same as having built it into how you teach.

How to cite this data. Attribute the eleven professional practices and the four levels to the British Council, “Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Framework for teachers”, published on TeachingEnglish at teachingenglish.org.uk, and state the date you checked it, because frameworks are revised. If you are quoting from this page rather than from the British Council directly, cite The TEFL Institute with the check date of 18 September 2026.

Formal and Informal CPD: Both Count, One Is Easier to Evidence

The distinction that matters in practice is not whether an activity is worthy. It is whether anything exists afterwards that another person can look at.

Every row on that table is real CPD. The rows get progressively harder to prove as you go down, which is not a reason to avoid them. The bottom two rows are where most teachers actually improve. It is a reason to write them up while they are fresh.

What “CPD Accredited” Means, and What It Does Not

You will see short courses advertised as “CPD accredited”, “CPD certified” or carrying a number of “CPD hours” or “CPD points”. This is worth understanding before you pay for one.

Those phrases come from private membership services that review courses and allow providers to display their marks. They are commercial arrangements, not government regulation, and the organisations behind them are not qualification regulators. There is no public register of CPD hours, no statutory body counting them for English language teachers, and no central standard that makes one provider’s “CPD hour” equal to another’s.

That does not make such courses worthless. A well-built short course on teaching young learners is useful whether or not it carries a private mark. It does mean the mark itself tells you very little, and it should not be confused with a qualification that sits at a stated level on a public register.

The difference is the subject of the other two pages here. What Ofqual is and what Ofqual-regulated means cover the register and the phrases that sound official but are not categories, and what an awarding body is covers who actually issues a certificate. If a course claims a level, ask which organisation awards it. If it claims CPD hours, ask who counts them, and expect the answer to be the provider.

How to Record CPD So an Employer Can Read It

A CPD record is not a filing cabinet of certificates. It is a short, dated list that someone else can skim in a minute. Five fields are enough.

• Date and length. The day or period, and the hours. An honest two hours beats a rounded-up twenty.
• What it was. Course, observation, reading, webinar, mentoring, conference session.
• Which practice it developed. Name one of the eleven above. This is the field most teachers leave out and the one that makes the entry credible.
• Who provided it, and any reference. Provider name, certificate number (if there is one), and awarding organisation (if it is a qualification).
• What changed. One sentence on what you now do differently. If nothing changed, say so, and say what you would try next.

Keep it in a single document or spreadsheet, add to it during the same week, and take a digital copy of every certificate as soon as it arrives. When an employer or a recruiter asks what you have done since your certificate, you send the list rather than reconstructing three years from memory.

There is a useful discipline hidden in the last field. The CIPD makes the same point about reflection, noting that “the key to making and truly embedding that change is reflecting on your learning”. A log that records only attendance is a register. A log that records what changed is evidence.

For the practical side of building a CPD habit around a teaching timetable, our longer guide to CPD for TEFL teachers goes into more detail on the routines.

How Much CPD Should an English Language Teacher Do?

There is no published number for this field, and anyone quoting one is quoting a different profession.

What does exist is a description of what good professional development looks like in schools. The Department for Education publishes the Standard for teachers’ professional development, described on GOV.UK as “a description of effective practice in professional development for teachers” and published on 12 July 2016. It is written for schools in England rather than for language centres, so treat it as a quality benchmark rather than a rule that applies to you.

A reasonable working answer, and the one we give when graduates ask, has three parts. Do something substantial once a year, meaning a course, a qualification or a sustained project rather than an hour of video. Do something small every term, usually an observation, a reading, or a webinar. And write it all down, because an unlogged year looks identical to an empty one.

If you are returning after a break, invert that order. Start with the written record of what you already have, and the gaps will tell you what to do first.

Where CPD Sits Next to Qualifications

CPD and qualifications are not rivals, nor are they the same thing.

A qualification is a single, assessed, dated award from a named organisation. CPD is everything after it. A regulated qualification can itself count as CPD, which is why teachers with a 120-hour certificate often later take a Level 5 diploma and count it as both.

Where the distinction bites is in job adverts. An advert asking for a qualification is asking for a specific credential at a specific level, and CPD does not substitute for it. An advert asking for evidence of ongoing development is asking for the log. And an advert for a qualified teacher post in a state school in England is asking for something different again, which our page on what QTS is explains, because no amount of CPD confers it.

If the acronyms in this area are what is slowing you down, the TEFL qualifications and terminology page sets out the whole family in one place.
If you are weighing academic study against subject training, our guide to what a PGCE is and whether you need one sets out what the academic route does and does not cover.

Your Next Step

If you already hold a TEFL qualification, the cheapest, most useful thing you can do this week costs nothing: open a document, list what you have done since the course with dates, and note where the gaps are. That list is the thing employers ask for, and almost nobody has it ready.

If your record is thin and you want the substantial item for this year, a regulated qualification is the version of CPD that an employer can verify without contacting anyone. 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 look that number up before you enrol, which is the practical difference between a qualification and a badge.

The post What Is CPD? Continuing Professional Development Explained for Teachers appeared first on TEFL Institute.

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. Our guide to what a PGCE is and what level it sits at explains why two different qualifications share those initials.

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. The one nationally assessed status in that group is HLTA, or Higher Level Teaching Assistant, which recognises support staff against 33 professional standards without conferring QTS. 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.
If you teach in further education rather than in a school, the equivalent professional status is QTLS, or Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills, and a QTLS holder who is a current member of the Society for Education and Training may be eligible for qualified teacher posts in English schools too.
Scotland runs a separate system with its own regulator and its own entry qualification, so qualified teacher status is not the reference point there. Our guide to what a PGDE is and how it leads to registration in Scotland covers that route.

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.

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