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.

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.

Can You Teach English in England Without QTS?

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

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

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

Does QTS Help If You Want to Teach English Abroad?

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

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

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

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

How to Check What a Role Actually Requires

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

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

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

Your Next Step

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

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

The post What Is QTS? Qualified Teacher Status Explained for English Teachers appeared first on TEFL Institute.

EAL stands for English as an Additional Language. It is the term schools in England and across the UK use for a pupil who was exposed to a language other than English at home, whatever their current fluency. EAL describes the learner, not a course or a qualification, and it is not a special educational need.

Key takeaways

• EAL means English as an Additional Language. It is a description of a learner, not a certificate you can study for.
• The official definition in England covers anyone exposed to a language other than English at home, so a fully fluent pupil can still be recorded as EAL.
• In January 2026, 21.6 per cent of pupils in England were recorded as having a first language known or believed to be other than English.
• EAL is not a special educational need, although an individual pupil may have both.
• There is no EAL qualification. The qualifications people actually hold for this work are teaching qualifications such as a regulated Level 5 TEFL diploma.
• If a course advertises itself as an EAL qualification, check who awards it and at what level before you pay.

What Does EAL Stand For, and Who Counts as an EAL Learner?

EAL stands for English as an Additional Language. The wording matters. It is deliberately not English as a Second Language, because a large share of the pupils it describes already speak two or three languages before English arrives on the list. Calling English their second language would simply be inaccurate.

The definition used in England is broader than most people expect. It covers a learner who has been, in the Department for Education wording quoted by The Bell Foundation, “exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English”. The Bell Foundation, an independent charitable foundation that specialises in this area, describes EAL as covering “a diverse and heterogeneous group of learners who speak English as an Additional Language”.

Read that carefully and two things follow. A child born in Manchester who hears Urdu at home and speaks English perfectly is recorded as EAL. So is a child who arrived last month with no English at all. The label tells you about language exposure at home. It tells you very little on its own about what any individual pupil can do.

EAL, ESL, EFL, ESOL and TESOL: What Is the Difference?

This is the question that sends most people looking for a definition in the first place. The five terms overlap, they are used inconsistently in job adverts, and only some of them describe anything you can be awarded. The table below is the short version.

Notice the split running down the last column. EAL, ESL and EFL describe learners and settings. TESOL and TEFL describe the teaching, which is why those are the acronyms that appear on certificates. If you want the longer treatment of the learner side, our guide to what ESL means and how ESL, EFL, ESOL and TESOL differ goes through each one, and the full reference list sits on our TEFL qualifications and terminology page. American readers who have met a different acronym entirely may want our explanation of what an ELA teacher is, since English Language Arts is a school subject for native speakers and is not the same thing at all.

How Many Pupils in England Are Recorded as EAL?

This is a large group, and it has been growing steadily for years. The figures below come from the Department for Education’s own school census publication, which is the source every other number you will read online is ultimately quoting.

Put plainly, better than one pupil in five in England is on the EAL register, and in primary schools it is closer to one in four. The full release is published by the Department for Education at Explore Education Statistics, and it is updated annually, so the share quoted here will move.

How to cite this data. Attribute the percentages to the Department for Education, “Schools, pupils and their characteristics”, academic year 2025/26, published 4 June 2026. Give the January 2026 census date alongside any figure you quote, because the census is a single day snapshot and the series rises most years. If you are quoting from this page rather than from the source, cite The TEFL Institute with the check date of 16 September 2026.

Is EAL a Special Educational Need?

No, and this is the misunderstanding worth correcting first, because it shapes how people are taught and how staff are recruited.

The Bell Foundation is explicit that having EAL is not in itself a special educational need. A pupil who is new to English needs language support. That is a different thing from a learning difficulty or a disability, and treating the two as interchangeable does the pupil no favours in either direction. An individual learner may of course have both, and will then need both kinds of support, assessed separately.

For anyone considering this work, the practical consequence is straightforward. The training that helps here is language teaching training. It is not special educational needs training, and a provider that blurs the two in its marketing is worth a second look.

Is EAL a Qualification You Can Study For?

No. There is no certificate called an EAL. You cannot be awarded EAL any more than you can be awarded “left handed”. It is a category a school records against a pupil, taken from the school census.

This trips people up because job adverts say things like “EAL qualification required”, and some course providers have noticed. What an advert of that kind almost always means is a recognised English language teaching qualification, held by someone who will work with EAL pupils. The distinction is not pedantry. It decides what you should be buying.

So when a course is marketed to you as an EAL qualification, ask the two questions that apply to any course. Who awards it, and at what level? The organisation that sets and issues a qualification is not always the company selling you the training, which is why we wrote a separate guide to what an awarding body actually is. And the level is only meaningful if it sits on a framework, which is what the Regulated Qualifications Framework provides.

What Qualifications Do Schools and Language Centres Actually Ask For?

It depends on the role, and the honest answer splits three ways.

A qualified teacher post in a state school in England needs qualified teacher status, full stop. No TEFL or EAL course substitutes for it. A support role, such as an EAL teaching assistant, is set locally by the school or the trust, and a recognised English language teaching qualification is a genuine advantage rather than a legal requirement. And in the independent sector, in language centres, in international schools and in summer provision, an English language teaching qualification is frequently the thing being asked for by name.

Where a qualification is asked for, employers increasingly want to know its level rather than only its hours. A regulated qualification carries a number you can look up. Ofqual, which in its own words is “The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual)” and which “regulates qualifications, examinations and assessments in England”, is the body that makes that possible.

One point of honesty, because it is the sort of thing providers tend to leave out. Our own 120 hour Advanced TEFL Course is an accredited course, not an Ofqual regulated qualification. Only the Level 5 diplomas above are regulated. If a regulated level is what a role asks for, the 120 hour course is not the one to buy, and we would rather say so here than have you find out at interview.

Does a TEFL Qualification Help You Get EAL Work?

In the parts of the sector where a qualification is asked for by name, yes, and for a simple reason. The skill an EAL learner needs from you is the skill a TEFL course teaches: how to make English comprehensible, how to assess a learner’s starting point, and how to build a lesson around a language gap rather than a subject gap.

What a TEFL qualification does not do is replace qualified teacher status in a state school classroom, and no reputable provider should suggest otherwise. Used honestly, it opens support roles, independent and international school posts, language centre work and private tuition. Used as a claimed shortcut into a maintained school teaching post, it will not survive first contact with a recruitment panel.

How to Check an EAL Course Before You Pay for It

Four questions, in this order, and they take about five minutes between them.

• Who awards it? Find the named awarding organisation, not just the company taking your money. If nobody is named, that is your answer.
• Is it regulated, and at what level? A regulated qualification has a number in the format 610/1571/4 and a stated level. “Ofqual approved” and “Ofqual aware” are not categories that exist.
• How many hours, and of what? Guided learning hours and total qualification time are different measures, and a headline hours figure on its own tells you very little.
• What does it actually claim to get you? A course that implies it qualifies you to teach in a state school is overclaiming, whatever else is true about it.

If you want that in more detail, our guide to what Ofqual is and what Ofqual regulated actually means walks through the register itself, including the two phrases above and why they turn up so often in TEFL marketing.

Where EAL Sits Next to the Rest of the Terminology

It helps to hold the whole set in one picture. EAL, ESL and EFL are labels for learners and the places they are learning. ESOL sits across both worlds, describing adult provision in the UK and a family of qualifications learners can take. TESOL and TEFL name the teaching and the training, which is why those are the words that end up printed on a certificate.

Get that straight and the job adverts stop being confusing. An advert asking for EAL experience wants someone who has worked with pupils learning English alongside the rest of the curriculum. An advert asking for a TEFL or TESOL qualification wants a specific document with a specific level on it. Very often the same person satisfies both, which is exactly why the terms get muddled in the first place.

Your Next Step

If you have read this far because a job advert asked for an EAL qualification, the thing to buy is a teaching 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, and you can check that number yourself before you enrol. That is the point of a regulated qualification, and it is the reason we keep telling people to look it up.

The post What Is EAL? English as an Additional Language Explained appeared first on TEFL Institute.

The Trinity CertTESOL is the Trinity Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, an initial teacher training qualification awarded by Trinity College London. It sits at Level 5 on the Ofqual Regulated Qualifications Framework, runs to a minimum of 130 guided learning hours, and includes at least six hours of assessed teaching with real learners.

If you have been comparing teacher training routes, the CertTESOL is the qualification that keeps appearing next to the CELTA and then never quite gets explained. Course providers sell it. Trinity itself describes it in the language of a syllabus. Almost nobody sets out, in plain terms, what the thing actually is, who stands behind it, and what you are committing to if you enrol.

That is what this page is for. Everything below about the qualification itself comes from Trinity College London’s own published specification, checked on 14 September 2026, and everything about levels comes from the UK government. For the wider vocabulary around it, our TEFL qualifications and terminology guide is the reference page.

Key takeaways

• CertTESOL stands for Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. It is awarded by Trinity College London.
• Trinity places it at Level 5 on the Ofqual Regulated Qualifications Framework, which it describes as comparable to the second year of an undergraduate degree.
• Minimum guided learning hours are 130, and total qualification time is 200.
• It includes a minimum of six hours of observed teaching practice with real learners, which is the single feature that most separates it from an online only route.
• Trinity does not run the courses or publish a price. Validated providers deliver them and set their own fees.

Who awards the CertTESOL, and who actually teaches it?

Two different organisations, and confusing them is the most common mistake people make when they start shopping.

Trinity College London is the awarding organisation. It writes the specification, sets the standard, validates the centres and issues the certificate. What it does not do is teach you. Trinity states the position plainly on its own course finder: “Trinity TESOL courses are delivered through validated course providers around the world.”

So the course you buy is run by a college, a language school or a training provider that Trinity has validated, and the qualification you receive is Trinity’s. This split matters for a practical reason. The quality of the certificate is fixed by Trinity. The quality of your four weeks, your tutor, your timetable and your feedback is fixed by whichever provider you picked. Two people can hold the same CertTESOL and have had completely different training.

It is the same structural point we make about the difference between a body that checks a course and a body that regulates a qualification, set out at length in accredited versus regulated TEFL.

There is a second consequence worth knowing before you pay. Because providers set their own dates and formats, the same qualification is sold as a four week full time course in one place and a part time course spread over several months in another. The certificate does not record which one you did.

When you are weighing providers, then, the questions that matter are not about Trinity. They are about the centre: how many trainees per tutor, who observes your teaching, and how much written feedback you get.

What level is the Trinity CertTESOL?

Level 5. Trinity’s own wording is that the CertTESOL sits at “Level 5 on the Ofqual Regulated Qualifications Framework (comparable to the second year of an undergraduate degree)”.

That places it on the same rung of the national framework as a set of qualifications most people already recognise. The table below is the government’s own list of example qualifications at Level 5 and the levels either side of it, so you can translate the claim into something familiar.

How to cite this table: the level examples are published by the UK government and can change without notice. If you quote them, cite GOV.UK as the source, name the level you are quoting, and give the date you checked it rather than the date you are writing. We checked this list on 14 September 2026.

One caution about the word equivalent, because it is oversold everywhere in this industry. Being placed at Level 5 means the qualification is pitched at the same demand as a foundation degree. It is not a degree, it carries no degree credit, and it will not satisfy a visa rule that asks for a bachelor’s degree. If the framework itself is new to you, we explain how levels and hours are recorded in our guide to the Ofqual register and whether a Level 5 TEFL course is worth it.

What is on the course? The five assessed units

The CertTESOL is assessed across five units, and they are unusually varied for an initial certificate. Trinity names them as follows.

Unit 5 is the one people remember. Spending several hours being taught a language you have no grounding in is an uncomfortable and genuinely useful exercise, and it is a feature of this qualification rather than of initial TEFL training generally.

How long is the CertTESOL, and how much teaching practice does it include?

Trinity publishes two figures, and they answer different questions. Minimum guided learning hours are 130. Total qualification time is 200.

Guided learning hours are the taught time. Total qualification time is the whole expected commitment including your own study and assessment. The gap between the two, 70 hours here, is the private work: the assignments, the reading, the lesson planning that nobody teaches you through.

The number that matters most, though, is the teaching practice. Trinity requires a “minimum of six hours with real learners”, observed and assessed. That is not a large amount of teaching in absolute terms, and it is a great deal more than most certificate routes require, because most require none at all.

Who can enrol? The entry requirements

The CertTESOL is an initial qualification, so no teaching experience is required. There is, however, a genuine entry bar, and it is higher than most online certificates set.

Trinity requires candidates to be at least 18, and to hold “qualifications sufficient for entry to higher education in their country”. It also requires “a high level of spoken and written English”, and for candidates who are not first language English speakers it sets that bar at C1, which is advanced level. Most validated centres also interview applicants and set a short pre course language task.

The practical effect is that the CertTESOL filters at the door. An online certificate generally does not, which is neither good nor bad in itself, but it does change who you are sitting next to and what a centre can assume about the group.

How much does a Trinity CertTESOL cost?

Trinity does not publish a price, and we are not going to invent one.

The reason is structural rather than evasive. Because Trinity validates providers instead of teaching the course itself, its own guidance states that providers “set their own course dates, fees and delivery formats” and tells prospective trainees to “contact them directly for the latest information”. There is no national price, and any single figure quoted to you as the cost of a CertTESOL is really the cost of one centre’s version of it.

What that means for you is simple. Get the fee in writing from the specific centre, and ask three follow up questions that quietly move the number: whether the registration and certification fee is included, whether materials are included, and what happens to your fee if you do not pass a unit first time.

Trinity CertTESOL or an Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL Diploma?

These are both Level 5 qualifications and they are built for different lives. The honest comparison is below, including the place where our own qualification does less than Trinity’s.

Read the table honestly and the choice resolves itself for most people. If you can commit to a fixed timetable at a physical or scheduled centre, you want assessed teaching practice on your record, and you meet the entry bar, the CertTESOL gives you something an online course cannot: a stranger watched you teach and signed off on it.

If you are working, or abroad, or starting from no teaching background and need to study around a job, a regulated online diploma gives you the framework level and a checkable reference number without the fixed timetable. Our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL Diploma is the route we built for that case.

If you want the two set against the CELTA and other options in one place, we compare all of them in our TEFL course comparison, and the acronyms themselves are untangled in TEFL versus TESOL versus CELTA.

How do you check a CertTESOL course is genuine?

Two checks, and between them they close off almost every way of being sold something that is not what it says.

1. Check the centre is validated by Trinity. Trinity publishes a course finder listing its validated providers. If a centre is selling a Trinity CertTESOL and does not appear there, stop and ask why. You can search it through Trinity’s own find a course page.
2. Check the qualification itself on the public register. The government’s find a regulated qualification service exists so anybody can “find out if a qualification is regulated (officially recognised)”, “see detailed information about a qualification” and “compare similar qualifications”. Ask any provider, ours included, for the reference number and look it up before you pay.

One more claim worth verifying rather than assuming. Trinity states that “the CertTESOL is accepted by the British Council as an initial TESOL or TEFL qualification”, which is a meaningful endorsement for anyone aiming at British Council accredited schools. It is also specific: it concerns that one recognition, and it is not a statement about every employer in every country.

Is the Trinity CertTESOL worth it?

It depends on what you are buying, and the useful version of that answer is not a yes or a no.

What you are paying for with a CertTESOL is observation and feedback. Someone watches you teach real learners, tells you what went wrong, and you do it again. That is the part of teacher training that is hardest to get any other way, and it is the part that new teachers most consistently say changed how they work. It also opens doors at schools that specify an initial qualification with assessed teaching practice, which some British Council accredited and European language schools do.

What you are not necessarily buying is a higher framework level than the alternatives, because a regulated Level 5 diploma sits on the same rung. Nor are you buying global brand recognition on the scale of the CELTA, which is simply a fact about market awareness rather than about quality. And you are committing to a centre’s timetable and a price you cannot compare nationally.

The people who tend to regret it are those who enrolled because it was the qualification they had heard of, discovered the full time schedule collided with work, and would have been better served by a regulated course they could study around a job. The people who rarely regret it are those who wanted to be watched teaching before they stood in front of a class abroad.

Choosing your route

Whichever way you go, ask the same two questions of any course you are shown. What level is it on a national framework, and who can verify that independently? A Trinity CertTESOL answers with Trinity’s specification and a validated centre. A regulated diploma answers with a qualification reference number on a public register. A course that answers with neither is selling you a logo.

If the regulated online route is the one that fits your life, our Level 5 TEFL Diploma is entered on the register at Level 5 with 180 guided learning hours, awarded by Highfield Qualifications. Take the number, check it yourself, and then decide.

The post What Is the Trinity CertTESOL? The Level 5 Qualification Explained appeared first on TEFL Institute.

An awarding body, properly called an awarding organisation, is the organisation that sets, assesses and issues a qualification. It is not the company that teaches your course. In England, Ofqual recognises awarding organisations and holds them to published rules, and only a recognised one can award a regulated qualification.

That distinction sounds like paperwork and is in fact the single most useful thing you can understand before buying a TEFL course. The name on the website is often not the name that will appear on your certificate; the second name is the one an employer will check.

Key takeaways:

• An awarding organisation writes the qualification specification, sets the assessment standard and issues the certificate.
• A training provider delivers the teaching. The two are usually different companies, and both can be perfectly legitimate.
• “Awarding body” and “awarding organisation” mean the same thing. Ofqual’s own wording is “awarding organisation”.
• Recognition is granted to the awarding organisation, not to the training provider that sells you the course.
• You can check whether an organisation is recognised on a free public government service in about a minute.
• Our regulated Level 5 qualifications are awarded by Highfield Qualifications, and we name it plainly rather than implying we award them ourselves.

Awarding body or awarding organisation: is there a difference?

No. They are two names for the same thing, and you will meet both in the same week.

“Awarding body” is the older, more conversational term and the one most people type into a search box. “Awarding organisation” is the term the regulator uses, and it is the one you will see on official pages. GOV. The UK’s public checker is titled “Find a regulated awarding organisation,” and its purpose is stated in one line: “Find out if the organisation offering your qualification is regulated (officially recognised) in England or Northern Ireland.”

Where the two words genuinely diverge is in the company of other words. An examination board is an awarding organisation that runs examinations, which is why the term feels natural for GCSEs and A levels and slightly odd for a vocational diploma studied online. A professional body is something else again, and being a member of one is not the same as being recognised as an awarding body.

For the rest of this page the two are used interchangeably, because the regulator does.

Who recognises awarding organisations, and what does recognition mean?

In England, that job belongs to Ofqual. Its own description of itself is one sentence long: “The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) regulates qualifications, examinations and assessments in England.” You can read it on the official GOV website.UK department page, which also records that it is a non-ministerial government department.

Recognition is the formal status Ofqual grants to an organisation, allowing it to award regulated qualifications. It is not a one-off approval that sits in a drawer afterwards. Ofqual publishes a set of rules, the General Conditions of Recognition, and its guidance page for awarding organisations is blunt about their reach: they “apply to all the qualifications and organisations we regulate”, and “All regulated awarding organisations have to follow them.”

Three consequences follow, and all three matter when you are comparing courses.

Recognition attaches to the organisation, not to a course or a company that resells it. A training provider cannot be recognised, because it is not the thing being recognised.

Recognition is ongoing. An organisation that stops meeting the conditions can have its recognition withdrawn, which is a meaningful difference from a logo that was granted once in 2015.

Recognition is territorial. Ofqual covers England, and by arrangement its register also answers the question for Northern Ireland. Scotland has the Scottish Qualifications Authority, Wales has Qualifications Wales, and Ireland has Quality and Qualifications Ireland. A qualification regulated by one is not automatically regulated by another.

Reference data: what the official sources say, checked 15 September 2026

Wording quoted verbatim from GOV.UK and checked on 15 September 2026. Sources: Ofqual on GOV.UK, Find a regulated awarding organisation and Understand our rules. Recognition is a statement about regulatory standing, not about course quality, price or employability.

How to cite this: The TEFL Institute, “What Is an Awarding Body? Who Actually Issues Your TEFL Certificate”, teflinstitute.com, official wording checked against GOV.UK on 15 September 2026.

Awarding body or training provider? The difference that costs people money

This is where most of the confusion in TEFL advertising lies, and it is worth slowing down to consider.

A training provider builds and sells the course. It writes the lessons, hosts the platform, answers your emails and takes your payment. An awarding organisation owns the qualification the course leads to. It decides what the qualification contains, how it is assessed and what standard a pass represents, and it issues the certificate.

The two roles are separate on purpose. A provider marking its own qualification to its own standard is not an independent check on anything.

A company can honestly say it delivers a qualification awarded by a recognised organisation. It cannot honestly say it is recognised, approved or accredited by Ofqual, because Ofqual does not do that to providers. If you see “Ofqual approved provider” or “Ofqual accredited school” on a website, the phrase is decoration. We set out the wider vocabulary problem in our guide to accredited versus regulated TEFL courses, and explain what Ofqual is and what Ofqual-regulated actually means.

How do you find out who awards your TEFL certificate?

Four questions, asked in this order, settle it for almost any course on the market.

1. Ask which organisation awards the qualification, by name. A provider that cannot answer this in one sentence has told you something. On a regulated qualification, the answer is a single named organisation, not a list of logos.
2. Ask for the qualification number. Regulated qualifications carry a unique number in the format 610/1571/4. It is the identifier the qualification is listed under, and it is what you search.
3. Check the organisation on the public service. Use GOV.UK’s Find a regulated awarding organisation service. It exists precisely to answer the question “is the organisation offering your qualification regulated”.
4. Match the certificate title word-for-word. Awarding organisations often hold several similarly named qualifications at different levels. A near match is not a match, and the title on the register is the title that should appear on your certificate.

Two habits make the check sharper. Search the organisation and the number rather than the provider’s trading name, because providers are not on the register and finding nothing proves very little about them. And read the level alongside the hours, because two qualifications can sit at the same level and represent very different amounts of work. Our longer piece on what the Ofqual register actually tells you about a Level 5 TEFL course works through the gap between regulatory standing and real-world value.

What the check will not tell you is whether the course is well written, whether the support is any good, or whether a school in your target country has heard of the qualification. It confirms who stands behind the certificate and nothing else. That is still a great deal more than a logo.

Which awarding body stands behind The TEFL Institute’s regulated qualifications?

Highfield Qualifications, and it is worth being exact rather than waving at the word.

Our Level 5 Diploma in TEFL is listed under qualification number 610/1571/4, with 180 guided learning hours and a total qualification time of 382 hours. Our Level 5 Advanced Diploma in TEFL is listed under 610/1573/8, with 300 guided learning hours, a total qualification time of 542 hours and 54 credits. Both are awarded by Highfield Qualifications, whose Ofqual recognition number is RN5219. Those are two separate specifications and they should not be quoted interchangeably.

These figures are stated here rather than linked, because the qualification register blocks automated access and we would rather you looked them up yourself than trusted a link we cannot demonstrate. Search either number, or search Highfield Qualifications by name, and the entry, the level and the awarding organisation will come back.

Equally worth saying plainly: our 120 Hour Advanced TEFL Course has no awarding organisation behind it, because it is an accredited course rather than a regulated qualification. It carries no qualification number and it is not on the register. It is the right purchase for a great many teachers and it is genuinely enough for most private language schools and online platforms, but we will not imply it is something it is not. A provider that is vague about which of its courses have an awarding organisation and which do not has answered the question by being vague.

For the rest of the vocabulary you will meet while comparing courses, our hub on TEFL qualifications and terminology explained defines awarding organisation alongside the framework levels, the acronyms and the certificate names.

Three things an awarding body is not

Clearing these up removes most of the remaining confusion.

An awarding body is not the same as an accreditation body. Accreditation is a quality review carried out by an independent organisation, and its rigour varies enormously depending on who did it. An accreditor does not award your certificate or place the qualification at a level. Plenty of good courses are accredited and have no awarding organisation, because they are not regulated qualifications at all.

An awarding body is not your school, your college or your online provider. Whoever taught you, the certificate is issued by the awarding organisation, and it is that name an employer will look for. This is why teachers are sometimes surprised to find a name they have never heard of on their own certificate.

An awarding body is not a guarantee of anything beyond standard. A recognised organisation behind your qualification tells an employer that the standard is independently set and verifiable. It does not promise a job, a visa, or acceptance by a particular school in a particular country. Anyone selling it as a guarantee is overselling it.

Ready to take a qualification with a named awarding body?

If you want a named awarding organisation and a number on your certificate, the qualification to consider is the 180 Hour Ofqual-Regulated Level 5 TEFL Diploma. It is the qualification behind number 610/1571/4; it is awarded by Highfield Qualifications; it is studied online at your own pace, and its standing is verifiable by anyone who asks. Current prices and start dates are kept up to date on the course page.

And if you are still deciding whether a regulated qualification is what you need at all, read the accredited versus regulated guide first. The wrong qualification bought confidently costs more than the right one bought slowly.

The post What Is an Awarding Body? Who Actually Issues Your TEFL Certificate appeared first on TEFL Institute.

The RQF is the Regulated Qualifications Framework, the system Ofqual uses to describe every qualification it regulates in England by two measures: level, running from entry level up to level 8, and size, counted in hours of study. It lets you compare a TEFL diploma against a degree or an NVQ without comparing subjects.

If you have been shopping for a TEFL course, you will have met the phrase “Level 5” long before anybody explained where that number comes from. It comes from here. The RQF is the reason a TEFL diploma can be placed on the same ladder as a foundation degree, a higher national diploma or an NVQ, and the reason a provider either can or cannot point you at a public entry to prove it.

This guide explains the framework itself: what the levels mean, how size is measured separately from level, what a Level 5 sits alongside, and how to check any qualification for yourself. For the narrower question of whether a Level 5 TEFL course earns its money, read is a Level 5 TEFL course worth it. For the acronym set around it, our TEFL qualifications and terminology guide is the reference page.

Key takeaways

• RQF stands for Regulated Qualifications Framework. It covers qualifications Ofqual regulates in England, plus vocational qualifications in Northern Ireland.
• It has nine levels: entry level, then levels 1 to 8. Level 3 is where A levels sit. Level 6 is where an honours degree sits.
• Level and size are separate. Size is stated as Total Qualification Time, which contains Guided Learning Hours.
• The TEFL Institute Level 5 Diploma is entered as 180 Guided Learning Hours with a Total Qualification Time of 382, awarded by Highfield Qualifications, checked 11 September 2026.

What does RQF stand for, and who runs it?

RQF stands for Regulated Qualifications Framework, and it is run by Ofqual, the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation. Ofqual is a non ministerial government department, which in plain terms means it is part of government but does not answer to a minister, and it reports to Parliament instead.

Ofqual’s own account of why the framework exists is worth reading in its own words. Writing on the official Ofqual blog, the regulator says the framework “should help people understand all the qualifications we regulate, general and vocational in England, and vocational in Northern Ireland, and how they relate to each other”, and that its purpose is to “improve consistency around how awarding organisations describe the size and challenge, or demand, of the qualifications they offer”.

Two things in that sentence matter to anybody buying a course. The first is the word regulate. A qualification on the framework has an awarding organisation that Ofqual holds to account, which is a different and stronger claim than a course that has been checked by a private membership body. We set that distinction out at length in accredited versus regulated TEFL. The second is demand. The framework does not rank subjects and it does not rank providers. It describes how difficult a qualification is and how long it takes.

What are the RQF levels, and what do they compare to?

There are nine levels. Entry level comes first, and is itself split into three sub levels, then levels 1 through 8 run above it. The usefulness of the framework is that government publishes example qualifications at each level, so you can translate an unfamiliar certificate into something you already recognise.

The table below is the government’s own list of example qualifications at each level, taken from the GOV.UK guide to what different qualification levels mean and checked on the date in the caption.

How to cite this table: the level examples are published by the UK government and can change without notice. If you quote them, cite GOV.UK as the source, name the level you are quoting, and give the date you checked it rather than the date you are writing. We checked this list on 11 September 2026.

Read the table once and the ladder stops being mysterious. School leaving qualifications sit at levels 1 to 3. The first two years of higher education sit at levels 4 and 5. A full honours degree is level 6. Everything above that is postgraduate. It is a ladder of demand, not a ladder of prestige, and a level 5 vocational qualification is not a watered down degree. It is a qualification pitched at the demand of higher education without being a degree in its own right.

That is also why the framework is so useful when somebody is comparing courses from different providers. Two courses can carry similar marketing language and sit three levels apart.

How does the RQF measure size as well as level?

Level tells you how demanding a qualification is. Size tells you how much of it there is, and the framework keeps the two apart deliberately.

Ofqual describes size using Total Qualification Time, or TQT, which the regulator defines as “an indication of how long a typical learner might take to study a qualification, including the time spent on their individual study and on assessment”. Inside that figure sits Guided Learning Hours, or GLH, which Ofqual describes as “the time spent actually being taught”.

So a course advertised as 180 hours is telling you about size, and a course described as Level 5 is telling you about demand. Neither number implies the other. A 180 hour course could in principle be pitched at level 2. A level 5 qualification could be much smaller or much larger than 180 hours. When a provider quotes only hours and never a level, you are being told half the story, and it is usually the half that is easier to inflate.

Here is what the two measures look like on a real entry. Both TEFL Institute diplomas are awarded by Highfield Qualifications, whose Ofqual organisation number is RN5219.

Notice how far apart TQT and GLH are on both rows. The taught time is roughly half the total expected study time, which is exactly what the framework is designed to reveal. A course sold purely on its headline hour count hides that gap.

One honest note on our own range, because a page about regulation should be the last place to blur it. Our 120 Hour Advanced TEFL Course is not an Ofqual regulated qualification and carries no RQF level. It is a good course and it is not a regulated one, and anybody telling you a 120 hour certificate is Ofqual regulated is either confused or hoping you are.

What is an RQF Level 5 qualification equivalent to?

An RQF Level 5 qualification sits at the same level of demand as a diploma of higher education, a foundation degree, a higher national diploma or a level 5 NVQ, which is the government’s own list. In degree terms that is the demand of the second year of an undergraduate course, not the whole degree.

It is worth being precise about the word equivalent, because it is the single most oversold word in TEFL marketing. A Level 5 qualification is placed at the same framework level as a foundation degree. It is not the same qualification, it does not carry the same credit, and it does not make you a graduate. What it does do is give an employer or a visa officer a recognised reference point for how demanding your training was, which a certificate with no level cannot do at all.

Where does a Level 5 TEFL Diploma sit on the RQF?

At level 5, with the size stated separately. That is the whole point of quoting both numbers in the table above rather than one of them.

For a teacher, the practical consequence is that the claim becomes checkable by a stranger. An international school in Dubai, a language academy in Madrid or a recruiter in Hanoi does not have to take a provider’s word about course quality. They can take a reference number and look it up. That is a different kind of trust from a logo on a certificate, and it is the reason the framework matters more to hiring than most course pages admit.

If you want the qualification itself rather than the theory, our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL course page carries the current specification and live pricing.

RQF, FHEQ and EQF: how the frameworks line up

The RQF is not the only framework a qualification can be described against, and Ofqual says so directly. In the same post quoted above, the regulator notes that “the RQF maps to the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications, as well as to the European Qualifications Framework too”.

Three names, three jobs. The RQF covers regulated qualifications in England, and vocational qualifications in Northern Ireland. The Framework for Higher Education Qualifications describes degrees and other higher education awards. The European Qualifications Framework is a reference system used to compare qualifications between countries, which is why it comes up so often for teachers applying for work across Europe. We deal with the European side of that comparison in our guide to the EQF Level 5 TEFL Diploma.

Scotland runs its own framework, which is why a qualification described only as level 5 can mean different things in Glasgow and in Manchester. If a level is quoted to you without a framework attached, the level on its own is not yet information.

How do you check a qualification is on the RQF?

You look it up on the public register, and it takes about a minute. The front door is the government’s find a regulated qualification service, which exists so that anybody can “find out if a qualification is regulated (officially recognised)”, “see detailed information about a qualification” and “compare similar qualifications”.

Four things are worth doing in that order.

1. Ask the provider for the qualification reference number, the nine character code in the form 610/1571/4. A provider who will not give you one is answering your question.
2. Search the register for that number and check the level and the awarding organisation match what you were told.
3. Check the size, both Total Qualification Time and Guided Learning Hours, against the hours on the sales page.
4. Check the qualification is still available for new registrations rather than withdrawn, because an old entry can outlive the course.

A word on why we have quoted our own reference numbers in text above rather than linking straight to each register entry. The register blocks automated checking, so we cannot verify a deep link to it on the day of writing, and we would rather give you a number you can paste yourself with the date we checked it than a link we have not been able to test. That is the standard set out in our editorial charter.

What the RQF does not tell you

The framework is a genuinely useful instrument and it is not a review. It says nothing about teaching quality, tutor support, how good the materials are, whether anybody marks your assignments properly, or whether the provider answers the phone. Two qualifications at the same level with the same Total Qualification Time can be a very different experience to study.

It also says nothing about whether a specific employer wants that qualification. Regulation is a floor, not a guarantee, and a Level 5 diploma does not oblige anybody to hire you. What it removes is the argument about whether your training counted.

And it is England and Northern Ireland in scope. A school in Seoul or Bogota is under no obligation to know what the RQF is. In practice many recruiters do recognise the phrase government regulated, and the reference number lets the curious ones check, but the framework carries no authority abroad beyond the credibility it lends.

Does an RQF level matter to employers abroad?

More than it used to, and unevenly. The pattern our graduates report is fairly consistent: private language schools care mostly about hours and availability, international schools and state programmes care about level and verifiable paperwork, and the roles that pay best sit in the second group.

Where a level earns its keep is in the moments when somebody has to justify a decision to a third party. A visa officer processing a work permit, a school inspector reviewing staff files, a head teacher defending a hire. In all three cases a framework level plus a reference number is easy to file and easy to defend, and a certificate with neither is not.

Ready to take a regulated TEFL qualification?

If you have read this far, you already know the two questions to ask about any TEFL course: what level is it on the framework, and what is its size in Total Qualification Time. A provider can answer both with a reference number, you are looking at a regulated qualification. If they change the subject, you are looking at marketing.

Our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL Diploma is entered on the register at level 5 with 180 Guided Learning Hours, awarded by Highfield Qualifications. Take the number, check it yourself, and then decide.

The post What Is the RQF? The Regulated Qualifications Framework Explained appeared first on TEFL Institute.