Insights from Oxford Seminars and TEFL Institute / Premier TEFL on finding the best course for your needs
Picking a TEFL provider can feel daunting. Every course promises “certification,” “job placement,” and “lifetime support,” and from the outside most websites look more or less the same. But the people who run these programmes — and the people who hire their graduates — say the differences between a course that sets you up properly and one that leaves you in the lurch
We put the question directly to three people who see the TEFL industry from the inside: Radu Olanson, founder and CEO of Oxford Seminars; Rowan Lomas, Oxford Seminars’ job placement manager; and Ian O’Sullivan, who owns both TEFL Institute and Premier TEFL. Between them they’ve certified and placed tens of thousands of teachers over a combined seven-plus decades in the industry. We’ve combined what they told us directly with the guidance both companies publish on their own sites. Here’s what actually matters.
Check the accreditation is real — not self-issued
The single biggest warning Ian O’Sullivan raised was fake accreditation. It’s common, he said, for TEFL companies to set up their own accreditation body, accredit themselves through it, and then display the resulting stamp on their site as if it were independent oversight. It looks official. It isn’t.
His advice is to check for accreditation from a body the provider doesn’t control — in the UK, that’s Ofqual, and in the US it’s DEAC, which works with the Department of Education. Genuinely regulated providers, he noted, tend to be a short list: TEFL Institute and Premier TEFL sit alongside only around four or five other Ofqual-regulated providers, most of them considerably larger. Reputable providers post their registration status publicly, so it’s checkable rather than something you have to take on faith. Ian said his companies regularly hear from people who took one of the cheapest, unaccredited options on the market — some bought through deal sites like Groupon — only to find that when they come looking for job placement help afterwards, there’s little that can be done for them.
He also flagged a newer version of the same problem: AI-generated courses. Some platforms will now produce an entire TEFL syllabus from a prompt as simple as “120-hour TEFL course.” The output isn’t yet good enough to compete with an established curriculum, he said, but the trend makes accreditation checks more important, not less — someone could complete a course an AI wrote and not actually have the knowledge to walk into a classroom.
Does the curriculum start teaching from day one?
Radu Olanson put practical, hands-on teaching skills at the top of his own checklist. From day one of Oxford Seminars’ course, students are running the same ESL warm-up games, icebreakers, and classroom exercises they’ll later use with their own students — not sitting through weeks of theory before they get near a lesson plan. Classroom management, lesson planning, and teaching across different age groups and proficiency levels are all covered directly, alongside a thorough grounding in English grammar rules — the part, Radu said, that most native speakers never had to learn explicitly but will be asked about constantly once they’re the one at the front of the room.
That practical grounding matters because a good number of first jobs come with little to no support. Radu described one former student who skipped job placement, ended up at a brand-new school with no curriculum, and was introduced to his first class by an owner who then simply walked out. The only thing that got him through that first month was the training manual from his course.
Does the course actually place people in jobs — and how good is that placement, really?
“Lifetime job assistance” is one of the more overused phrases in TEFL marketing, according to Radu. He said his company regularly hears from graduates of competitor courses whose lifetime job assistance amounted to a reference letter and a list of five or ten job-board websites.
Rowan Lomas, who has run job placement at Oxford Seminars for sixteen years, described what a real placement service should look like in practice: reviewing and tailoring resumes and cover letters, introducing vetted applications to schools and recruiters the provider already has direct relationships with in dozens of countries, helping with interview prep and contract review, and staying available for second, third, and later job moves as teachers move between countries. Crucially, that vetting runs in both directions — before Oxford Seminars adds a school or recruiter to its network, Rowan’s team checks their history online, looks for blacklist reports, and gets references from teachers who’ve actually worked there: were contracts honoured, was pay on time, was the promised curriculum and accommodation actually provided.
A useful question to ask any provider, based on what both Radu and Rowan described: are there currently more employers asking that provider for graduates than the provider has graduates to send? At Oxford Seminars, Rowan said, that’s consistently true — the company cannot fill anywhere near the volume of openings its school and recruiter contacts report each year.
Recommended TEFL Courses
The TEFL Institute of Ireland
Gain internationally recognised TEFL certification, practical teaching skills, expert support, and the confidence to start your teaching journey anywhere.
Premier TEFL
Get qualified with flexible TEFL training, practical resources, expert guidance, and the confidence to teach English and explore opportunities worldwide.
The TEFL Institute
Get TEFL certified, gain practical teaching skills, and turn your qualification into opportunities to teach, travel, work, and experience life abroad.
Oxford Seminars
Turn your dream of teaching abroad into reality with practical training, and the confidence to begin your international adventure.
How long has the provider actually been doing this?
Track record was something Radu returned to directly: some TEFL companies set up shop and disappear within a couple of years. Longevity is a reasonable proxy for whether a provider will still exist — and still be reachable for support — well into a graduate’s teaching career. It’s also worth checking a provider’s standing with employers directly, not just with past students: a course can have glowing student reviews and still be poorly regarded by the schools that actually hire its graduates.
What their own websites add
Beyond what came up in conversation, both companies publish their own guidance for prospective students — and it lines up closely with what Radu, Rowan, and Ian said on the record, while adding a few practical points worth flagging.
TEFL Institute’s own published guide to choosing a course — written by Ian O’Sullivan himself — repeats the warning about self-issued accreditation almost word for word, then goes further on two fronts. First, support: a good provider should offer a genuine point of contact during and after the course, not just at sign-up — the guide specifically recommends checking whether you can reach the provider by phone, email, or live chat, and whether they publish set hours, because some of the cheapest courses are effectively run by one person with no real support infrastructure behind them. Second, fine print: watch for tight completion deadlines designed to force an extension fee, and check upfront whether a hard copy of your certificate is included in the price — both are called out as common tactics among the cheaper providers, Groupon-sold courses included.
The guide also settles a common point of confusion: a teaching practicum isn’t strictly necessary for a first TEFL job. It’s the kind of thing some providers imply is mandatory because they happen to offer one. A reputable 120-hour course — the industry-standard minimum — is enough to get started; a practicum only becomes worth the extra cost (and it is substantial, with CELTA and Trinity CertTESOL both running upward of £1,200 for a month of full-time study) if you’re already fairly sure teaching is going to be a career rather than an experience.
Oxford Seminars’ site backs up what Radu and Rowan described in the interview with specifics: the course comes with a named textbook (Jeremy Harmer’s, an established name in ELT) alongside its own training manual and grammar text, and the company backs its placement service with a formal money-back guarantee — tuition refunded if a graduate who follows the job search process properly (a minimum number of applications across several countries) isn’t offered a position within six months. It’s a concrete, checkable version of the “real job placement vs. marketing line” distinction Radu drew in conversation — worth asking any provider whether they offer anything comparable.
Consolidated checklist
Drawing directly from what Radu, Rowan, and Ian described, these are the questions worth asking before paying for any TESOL/TESL/TEFL course:
- Is the accreditation independent? Look for a regulator the provider doesn’t control (Ofqual in the UK, DEAC in the US), and check that the registration is publicly listed — not just claimed.
- Does teaching practice start on day one, or is it weeks of theory before any hands-on classroom skills?
- Does it cover cultural adjustment, not just teaching technique — culture shock is something almost everyone living abroad eventually faces.
- Is job placement a real service or a marketing line? Ask specifically what happens after the course ends, not just what’s promised.
- Does the provider vet its own employer network — checking references, contracts, and pay history before sending graduates there?
- How long has the provider been operating, and does it have a track record with schools, not just with students?
- Are there more employers seeking graduates than the provider has graduates to supply? That imbalance is a reasonable proxy for genuine demand and a healthy placement network.
- Is the standard 120 hours actually covered, with real time given to grammar and classroom methodology rather than padding?
- Can you reach a real person during and after the course — phone, email, or live chat, with published hours — rather than a single-operator setup?
- Is the certificate hard copy included, and is the completion deadline reasonable, or built to push you into paying an extension fee?
- Does the provider back its placement service with anything concrete, such as a formal money-back guarantee, rather than just a promise?
None of this guarantees a smooth first year of teaching — nothing does. But asking these questions upfront is the difference between choosing a course and hoping for the best.
Some contributors to this article have a commercial relationship with EFL Magazine. The article is independently produced and remains under the editorial control of EFL Magazine.
Subscribe to the EFL Magazine Newsletter
