Teachers are a school's competitive advantage

Why sustainable teaching is smart business: support teachers well, protect their capacity, and strengthen what makes your school human

The world is changing, and so our industry is changing, too.

There are fewer students in some markets. There are a lot of teachers competing for work. AI is changing what learners expect and what they are willing to pay for. Precarity comes up again and again in conversations across ELT.

This creates a sense of threat.

And I’m slightly sorry to start this article there, because I know we hear enough bad news already. But this is the sentence that has been sitting in my head for a while.

The problem is that if we keep staring at the threat and asking only, “How do we survive this?”, we can get stuck inside the problem.

So I want to suggest a different question:

What can language schools offer that is difficult to replace?

My answer is: your teachers.

I don’t mean the fact that you employ teachers - of course there are teachers at any school, I know. But the quality of the human experience those teachers are able to create? That’s unique to each school.

Teachers bring qualities such as:

~ their judgment

~ their relationships with students

~ their ability to notice what is happening in a room and respond

~ their experience

~ their warmth!

~ their professional knowledge!

~ their ability to challenge, reassure, explain, improvise, and connect

to the table.

It’s exactly these things that become harder to offer consistently when teachers are exhausted, underpaid, overloaded, or treated as interchangeable delivery mechanisms.

This is why I think teacher sustainability is part of the business, and not separate from the business of running a language school.

The more a school protects teachers’ time, supports them adequately financially, gives them meaningful professional support, includes them in conversations that affect their work, and recognizes them as individuals rather than “units of teaching capacity”, the more likely those teachers are to have the capacity to do excellent work.

And that affects your students rather directly.

Teachers who are okay (and I mean genuinely okay) are better able to create the conditions in which learning can happen.

I don’t want to imply that teachers are solely responsible for quality. Rather, I want to draw attention to the fact that everything is entangled.

What teachers can do depends on scheduling, administration, leadership, communication, student expectations, parent expectations, systems, policies and resources.

So, management is part of this, and so is admin, and so are students.

But I often notice that teachers are oddly absent from conversations about what makes a language school competitive. They are treated as though they are simply the people who deliver the product.

I think they are actually more like the product’s defining human element.

If two schools offer similar courses, similar materials, similar prices and similar technology, what makes one feel meaningfully different?

Very often, it is the people.

In a market where technology can increasingly deliver information, practice, explanations and even personalized feedback, the human side of education becomes more, not less, important.

So perhaps one of the most useful questions language schools can ask right now is not only:

How do we attract more students?

But also:

What kind of working conditions allow our teachers to become the reason students want to stay?

That is currently the most strategic question schools can and should ask - rather than treating ‘teacher wellbeing’ as a soft focus for later.

I’d love to hear how this looks in your context. What do you think makes a language school genuinely competitive now? How much of that comes down to the teachers?

Categories: : teacher burnout, teacher wellbeing, teaching systems, teacher sustainability