English language schools are preparing for another crushing summer
English language schools are facing another tough summer as strict COVID travel restrictions still apply to Brazilian students who normally make up the majority of adult students in Malta.
A leading player in the sector, Andrew Mangion, said it would soon be too late to save the market unless Brazil was removed from Malta’s dark red list.
This means that prospective Brazilian students must either be quarantined for 10 days upon arrival or travel to another country on the green list and stay there for two weeks before going to Malta.
Brazilian students are mostly adults with high spending power and whose average stay on the island is longer than a month.
No English-speaking student would be willing to go through so much trouble when he could easily travel to another country without such restrictions, said Mangion, the executive chairman and CEO of EC Malta, a leading English language school that operates in several countries.
The majority of adult language students from Brazil
In 2019, the vast majority of adult students in Malta’s TEFL (teaching English as a Foreign Language) schools came from Brazil, Mangion said.
Caroline Tissot, CEO of FELTOM (Federation of English Language Teaching Organizations), said the Brazilian market was very important.
Two years ago, it was Malta’s third largest market for its language schools. Italy had a 12 percent share, Columbia 9.1 percent and Brazil was just behind by nine percent.
However, Brazilian students are mostly high-spending adults whose average time on the island is longer than a month. The Brazilian market is the one that keeps schools afloat during the shoulder months, Tissot remarked.
Malta’s main competitors for the Brazilian market are Ireland and Canada, both of which have opened their borders and are taking bookings from Brazilian students, she added.
Tissot also said that once an agent is lost to this market, it is very difficult to pull them back.
Language schools hanging in the balance
Maltese-language schools have been virtually decimated by the pandemic.
By May 2020, within weeks of the first case registered in Malta, the sector had already been hit hard by cancellations, which put many schools in dire financial straits.
After reopening last July after a second lockdown, foreign students were found to be partially behind an increase in COVID cases and schools were ordered to close their doors only weeks later.
The move was described by FELTOM at the time as “unjustified and disproportionate”.
Mangion said that now, after a long period of uncertainty in the sector, English language schools were being left hanging in the balance again.
He said operators in the industry could not understand the reasoning behind the restrictions on students from Brazil.
The reason given was that “the level of testing in Brazil is still too low”. But Malta was receiving travelers from the United Kingdom and Scandinavian countries despite the fact that these countries had completely removed all testing, he said.
FELTOM in talks with the government
The federation has been in talks with the public health department as well as the Prime Minister’s Office in an attempt to resolve the situation but no agreement has been reached.
Mangion said schools welcomed the news from authorities a few weeks ago that all restrictions would be lifted.
But they were still waiting for the removal of the measures that currently put a large share of their market.
He said English-language schools were not asking for grants but only to reopen borders so that TEFL schools could re-operate without restrictions.
Questions sent to public health authorities about when Brazil and other countries will be removed from the dark red travel list remain unanswered.
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