The TEFL Institute and Premier TEFL owner talks career detours, accreditation, and where teachers are heading next
Ian O’Sullivan runs one of the most well-known brands in the TEFL industry: TEFL Institute and Premier TEFL, both based in Ireland with twelve staff between them. His path into the industry started with cruise ships and cross-channel ferries, before a family business brought him into TEFL.
Q: How did you get involved with TEFL?
A: My first job was working as a jeweller on cruise liners. I travelled around the world — Asia, the USA, Canada, South America. I did that for five years and then wanted to settle down, so I moved on to work as a chief purser on ferries between the UK and Ireland for about twelve years. My sister had started a business called i-2-i. She had taught in Japan herself and when she returned to the UK she realized that you didn’t need something like CELTA or Trinity to go to Japan and teach.
She started TEFL courses on weekends in Birmingham, in a borrowed portacabin at a university because she couldn’t afford an office. Education agents from Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan began coming over to meet her. I told her I thought it would work in Ireland too, so I started it there with one computer and built it up to about eighteen staff.
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Q: And that grew into something much bigger?
A: i-2-i’s staff came up with the idea of an online course — we were pioneers of online TEFL. When we turned on the online business in Ireland, we didn’t know what had set in. Money was coming in from every currency imaginable, and we had about fifteen different bank accounts in the UK just to handle it. This was before PayPal and Stripe, so it was pandemonium for about a year — honestly, probably the worst year of my life. The dust settled eventually, we opened offices in America and Australia, and then TUI Travel bought the company. My sister was at dinner with a TUI director, she mentioned she was thinking of selling, and that was that.
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Q: What did you do after the sale?
A: I was in a non-compete for a while. When it ended, three of us who had worked at i-2-i formed a company called Love TEFL. We traded for about six months before some Irish investors, who had seen how well the online Irish TEFL market had done before, bought us out too. At that point I didn’t want to work for anyone else — I just liked being able to innovate and do things my way. So I left and started TEFL Institute and Premier TEFL.
Q: Why two separate companies rather than one?
A: We saw two distinct markets in global TEFL. Premier TEFL is aimed at a younger audience, approximately 18 to 24. TEFL Institute is much more educational and has a wider age range, from around 20 years old up to 65. No one else was really serving that second, more education-oriented segment of TEFL — Bridge TEFL would be our closest competitor there, and they’re much bigger than us. Both companies are growing, though the wider TEFL market hasn’t been.
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Q: What sets your courses apart from the rest of the market?
A: First and foremost, accreditation. In the UK we’re regulated by Ofqual, through which we offer a Level 5 TEFL course. There are only around four or five providers with that kind of regulated status, and most of them are much bigger businesses than us. We’re also recognized by DEAC in the US, which works with the US Department of Education, so employers know our curriculum is up to date and robust.
On top of that, we focus heavily on Europe — since Brexit, we’re the largest online TEFL company still based inside the EU, which makes it much easier for us to place teachers in Europe without the visa and work-permit issues UK or US companies now face. We’re also one of the only TEFL providers partnered with the Gaisce Award, which rewards young people for civic duty and work ethic. And we keep the team small — twelve people across both companies, two of them dedicated to careers support, helping graduates with CVs and cover letters.
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Q: How big a problem is fake accreditation in this industry?
A: It’s a real problem. There are a lot of companies that create their own accreditation bodies, accredit themselves through them, and then put the stamp on their website. It looks official, but it really isn’t. The best thing anyone can do is check for government-regulated courses directly — our own courses on the Ofqual and DEAC registers are posted publicly. We get a lot of people who’ve taken some of the cheapest, unaccredited courses on the market — some of them through Groupon — who come to us afterward hoping for a job placement. As they usually already know, we can’t do much for them.
Q: AI is a big topic in every field right now. How is it showing up in TEFL?
A: There’s a real movement toward AI, and a lot of online providers are using chatbots designed to look like teachers on their courses. We’ve put AI into our learning platform and our website, but we never meant to cut staff or anything like that — it’s there to help them and give them more time. There are also platforms now that will write an entire TEFL course for you — you give it a title like “120-hour TEFL course” and it creates the whole thing. The quality isn’t as good yet, but it’s moving that way, which is exactly why accreditation matters so much. Someone could complete a course an AI wrote and not actually have the knowledge to go teach.
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Q: Why do you think overall demand for TEFL has slowed down a little in recent years?
A: It’s mainly that people have other ways to fund travelling abroad now — social media. You’ve got TikTokers and bloggers making good money, and I’ve heard of people holding two full-time remote jobs while posting from overseas about how they get away with it. That’s taken people out of the TEFL pipeline. The upside is that schools are now competing for a smaller pool of teachers, so pay and conditions have improved. In many cases contracts have shortened from a year or so down to five months.
Q: Where are teachers finding the best opportunities right now?
A: Europe is huge at the moment — Spain, Italy, Portugal, Germany, France. A lot of that is UK and Irish teachers wanting to stay close to home. For American teachers, it’s really Asia — Japan, South Korea. Vietnam has turned into a big destination too, and we’re also seeing growth in Central Asia, like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where we run a joint course: two weeks of live classes as part of our Level 5 qualification, then six months online.
Q: Final question — what advice would you give to someone who’s a bit uncomfortable with teaching English abroad?
A: If you really want to get into a culture and learn to live in it, it’s a really great way to see the world. Your first contract might frighten you, but you get better at it and eventually become the teacher who’s helping the new ones. There’s a huge community of teachers everywhere you go — they all stick together.
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