Fierce school competition means more options

by Greg Goodale

Fierce competition forces established schools to offer new productsSince 1992 Mike Mills, owner of the Mike Mills School of English, has been predicting that the growth in demand for language schools would finally come to a halt. But his predictions have been wrong.
"The demand is huge and it appears not to be sliding down, at least from our point of view," Mills said. "We're an expensive school and we would notice the difference. The demand doesn't seem to be shrinking and that's why I eventually decided to start my own business."With Warsaw's 10 largest language schools raking in a combined zł. 44.1 million ($10.7 million) in 2001, according to Business Journal figures, the market remains attractive to new businesses hoping for a slice of the pie. The result is new market entrants and fierce competition that is forcing established schools to offer new products, such as flexible courses and Web-based learning.
The new entrants have made headway by slashing costs: the Com Bridge school charges just zł. 500 for a semester, less than half the lowest rate charged by Mills. But established schools are complaining that price competition at the bottom end of the market is giving students a false impression of language school standards. "The situation is increasingly difficult because there is an increasing number of tiny schools that don't care about quality," said Aneta Mikulińska, managing director of the Pol-Anglo School of English, which handles in-company teaching contracts for state television Telewizja Polska, LOT Polish Airlines and the National Bank of Poland (NBP). "They employ English philology students who are not fully qualified. They pay them relatively little so they can offer very low prices. Since most of our students are young people on a college grant or (receiving) money from their parents, they are very sensitive to price."
With cheap new competitors gouging away at the market, established language schools are putting on their creative marketing hats to help preserve market share.
Schools such as the Spanish franchise Opening, which opened last year in Warsaw, have introduced Web-supported learning and long opening hours to give students a more flexible timetable. Another contestant in the language school technology race is Archibald, which launched its Archibald Web Academy (AWA) last October in Warsaw. Initially an interactive library of online vocabulary and grammar exercises, AWA starting next month will become the heart of a new English course with 53 hours of group work supported by 15 hours of individual work using the Internet that can be flexibly scheduled.
"This is certainly a mature market, so that it takes more and more work to persuade customers to sign up for new courses," said Magdalena Honory, managing director of Archibald. "Computer technology and the Internet are a part of our lives, but this course is also designed to meet the individual needs of clients who have less free time."
U.S. school Ability aims to provide even more flexibility by offering a Web-learning package for its business classes called "Tell me more," developed by French software house Aureal Systems. According to Adam Iwanowski, Ability's marketing manager, each level of the course will involve just 10 hours of one-on-one lessons, giving students 12 months to complete up to 200 hours of additional lessons using the software. "Tell me more" contains exercises for all areas of language, including a speech recognition engine for correcting pronunciation, and gives regular feedback to a tutor who can remotely vary the difficulty of the exercises. "By the end of the year 500-700 students … will be learning languages using the system," Iwanowski said. Despite the growing interest in new technology, most schools maintain that direct contact with a qualified teacher is still the most effective way to learn. "I strongly believe that different learners learn in a different way," said Mills, who from 1992 worked as a British Council teacher and examiner and in 1998 set up his own language school that today helps some 250 students through their exams each semester. "If you try and underpin your teaching with a single method, you are saying that there is a right way to teach and a right way to learn," he said. "I encourage my teachers to give students a chance to find a way of learning that suits them."