Where have all the students gone?

Well, certainly not to the UK. Back in November I opined on the demise of the EFL teacher, one aspect I failed to cover is the possible right-sizing of teacher supply to meet with student numbers.

An article in the StudyTravel Ltd (ST Magazine & ST Alphe Conferences) magazine in December of last year headlined “UK ELT 2024 Q3 weeks down, as English UK indicates 'new normal' level”. The article, using the data from English UK QUIC stats programme, showing that Q3 of 2024 was 75% of the same period in 2019. If you look at the data regionally within the UK, I suspect there are also sharper differences to be found.

Just let that number sink in for a mo. Imagine yourself to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister in normal speak) standing up in parliament to announce that GDP had settled at a ‘new normal’ that is three-quarters the size it was prior to the pandemic!

The same article goes on to the list the following as some of the root causes of this decapitation of the industry – “globally the ELT industry is battling visa restrictions in major destinations, cost of living pressures, evolving technology, improving tuition in home countries, and increasing competition from emerging intra-regional destinations.”

Let’s run with a couple of those and then move on to what I think is a big hit to demand.

There is without doubt a significant improvement in language proficiency driven by improved teaching in schools. Anyone with a summer centre cannot fail to notice just how good many of the kids are at English. Wider surveys support this anecdotal evidence.

The EU runs the Eurobarometer survey which, and I quote, “provides information on citizens' language skills, use of languages and attitude to language learning within the European Union. It also allows us to see the evolution over time, as results are compared with the previous language survey conducted in 2012.” And for those who want to dig a little more, here’s the link - https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2979

For the purposes of this article the strongest evidence of increased proficiency comes near to the top of the summary, “English is spoken by about half of the Europeans (47%) as a foreign or second language, notably increasing 5 percentage points since 2012. 7 out of 10 young Europeans can have a conversation in English, which is 9 percentage points more than in previous survey.” And here’s the neat chart illustrating the point:

You can see how that would translate into a fall in demand for the overseas language course.

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Secondly, ‘evolving technology’. Evolution is a process of change spread over tens of thousands of years - what is happening with technology now is like the tornado in the ‘Wizard of Oz’ with ideas being ripped out of the ground, hurled into the air and blended with the speed of a top-notch mixologist at The Long Island Bar, NYC. The pace of change is set on an exponential track - it only took 30 years to get from the Spitfire to Concorde and as Max Roser cites “Just 10 years ago, no machine could reliably provide language or image recognition at a human level. But, ….. AI systems have become steadily more capable and are now beating humans in?tests?in all these domains.”*

My supposition is that while current technology is aiding and supplementing more traditional forms of language learning, learners are hedging their bets somewhat. They are waiting to see what technological advancement will bring into being – why invest resources into an activity such as travelling overseas to learn a language, when highly affordable alternatives may be just around the corner. This, of course should not just be a worry for traditional language schools but also for current technology – perhaps Duolingo should be looking to its laurels as well.

The one contributor to market shrinkage that no-one ever really wants to raise is the cost. Now, before hackles rise, I am not positing that this is price gouging by anyone involved in the chain of getting a punter from home to classroom but course and most significantly accommodation are big ticket items these days.

Having been around in the industry for 35 years I happen to have hoovered up a lot of data and over the Christmas holidays I was musing on the subject of this article, which led me to dive into the archives to pull out some numbers. I compared some average school fees between 2005 and 2024. Over that period the Bank of England showed a 71.8% uplift in prices whereas a bundle of a week of General English and a week of single homestay shows a 114% increase.

Where next then? The industry is under assault from technology, diminished need for core product and a high-end pricing proposition. You may have heard me mention this before, but my strongest recommendation is put the travel back into study travel.

With a greater focus on this element, we combat the effects of technology by offering a sensory and experiential product, something that is very hard to substitute with software. This should point us to focus on younger and older travel students. For the younger learners we have a great product in the short stay and summer camp; for the older learners we can build packages that suit their tastes and preferences.

Younger learners also benefit from being the lucky recipients of parental largesse - parents will and do spend on their off-spring where they would not spend on themselves. Older learners who, to my surprise now include me, have benefited from that generational wealth improvement that has been denied to Zoomers. These two segments are less price sensitive.

Improving proficiency levels does not mean that appetites for travel are diminished, in fact quite the opposite. Better language skills instil confidence in travel and exploring, and if you can buff up your already more than acceptable listening and speaking abilities, then so much the better.

In the end then we should worry less about the teacher supply I talked about in an article last year and focus on putting experience at the core of what we do. Let’s make great travel experiences, focus on much shorter stays, and hire and develop great activity staff teams who will deliver amazing experiences that technology simply can’t replace.

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*??Max Roser (2022) - “The brief history of artificial intelligence: the world has changed fast — what might be next?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/brief-history-of-ai' [Online Resource]

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