Accreditations for the language school

As part of our research we have written to a couple of organisations to see if our plans have any chance of succeeding. We also wanted to know what we should do to get our language school join one of them. Until now we have received all kinds of responses. Some of the organisations have their own schools and do not let people join them, others were enthusiastic but were not able to help us any further until we were actually in Spain. Although they could not help us right now, the responses were very valuable because it gave us the impression there was still a market for our plans. One of them actually said we had something unique and definitely had a chance in succeeding!

To get people to book our courses we want to have accreditations, which show that the school has been inspected and meets all the standards. This was the second part of our research. We asked the organisations if they knew how we could get those accreditations, which ones were best to have, and what rules we should comply with? To get answers to these questions we looked at several websites and asked a school in Malaga for help. Ellen followed a course there in 2004 and she hoped they would be kind enough to help us. Unfortunately their response was not what we had hoped. They did help us, but the information they gave us was a bit disappointing. The main organisation to give out accreditations is called Cervantes and they have quite a few demands. Their basic demands are: two certified teachers, a minimum space of 150m² and a space for the teachers to work on a computer and do their administrative duties. The last two things are not a real issue, that's just something we need to keep in the back of our heads when we search for a property, but the first demand is definitely a problem. We did not plan on hiring any staff right in the beginning. The idea was that Ellen would do all the teaching so we could keep the groups small and we could cut on the costs. So in the beginning we will not be able to get accredited by this organisation.

Luckily, there are quite a number of organisations and we decided to focus on those first and try to get the accreditation of Cervantes at a later date. We have received some links on which we can find information about these organisations and will see what demands these have with regard to accreditations. If they also have demands we can not comply with at the start we will just have to try and start the company without accreditations. We are definitely not giving up (yet)!!