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Have you ever thought of opening your own language school?
At TutorCruncher, we've tread down a similar path ourselves in helping our users manage their education businesses. Along the way, we've gained some valuable experience on what it takes to run an education business, so to help you get started in setting up your language school, here are our five essential steps that we believe you need to follow.
Hiring a Teaching Team
Finding the right tutors for your English language school is one of the biggest challenges you will face. A good language school needs a team that has experience and enthusiasm for their work. They should also be appropriately qualified and demonstrate a good understanding of the various teaching methods used when teaching English as a Foreign Language. As a language school director, you'll want assurance that your team can maintain high standards and provide continuity to students during busy periods.
Having Processes and Procedures in Place
When you're just starting out, you may not view processes as particularly important. However, we advise not to wait until your language school grows before having these in place, start now. As the saying goes, ‘start as you intend to go on'. Having procedures in place early will ensure that your language school is consistently offering the same level of service to every student that attends your classes. Procedures also help set the expectations of your tutors and sets boundaries. Your staff need to know what's expected of them and what their specific roles and responsibilities are.
Taking Care of Administration
If there's one thing that we wished we had in place before we started our education business, a user friendly and reliable administration system would be it. That’s why we developed TutorCruncher, admin software for language schools and tutoring agencies. With our software, you can easily keep track of lesson schedules, workflow, invoices and payroll quickly and easily. With TutorCruncher, you can also run data reports, send automated emails and integrate the system with your current CMS.
Meeting Student's Needs
Running an English language school is all about offering excellent customer service. Not only do your students expect to see improvements in their English but they expect to have your support with any aspect of their learning. Paying attention to your students' needs is essential and all your tutors should have this as a strong focal point during their lessons. If students feel that their needs are being met and their opinions are valued, they'll keep using your services.
Targeting Your Marketing
Knowing how to effectively market your English language school is one of the biggest challenges every new business faces. We advise that you create a marketing strategy before your language school launches, so that you have a strategic plan in place moving forward. Once you're faced with the daily tasks of running a language school, you may find that you won't have the time to document a marketing plan. Have a look at what other schools are doing in your area in terms of marketing. What seems to be working for them? Have you noticed any shortcomings in their marketing efforts that you could learn from? When it comes to effectively marketing a new business in the education industry, quality is more important than quantity and the longer you're in business, the better you'll know which marketing methods work for your language school.
Do you have experience of running an English language school? Which of the points above resonate with you the most? What advice do you have for anyone looking to set up an English language school?
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