Person Specification

Essential Requirements
A recognised teaching qualification such as RSA / Cambridge CELTA or Trinity Cert TESOL or equivalent (Qualification must contain at least 100 hours of ELT/TESOL input, minimum 6 hours supervised teaching practice and must be externally validated by a reputable examination body) or PGCE in relevant subjects, BEd, QTS or overseas equivalent.

DELTA, Dip TESOL or equivalent

Minimum of 5 years teaching experience including time with teenagers

Eligible to live and work in the UK (we cannot assist in any way with work permits or visas)

University degree or overseas equivalent

Excellent communication and organisational skills

Exemplary customer service skills

Ability to represent Concorde International in a professional manner

Recent DBS check (formerly CRB)

Flexible and reliable

Committed to your own professional development and that of others

Desirable Requirements

All applicants will need to demonstrate that they have exceptional English language ability in order to include the teaching of pronunciation and intonation.

Previous experience supporting both teachers and students

Previous teaching experience with teenagers and young learners, especially within multinational classes

Effective management and motivational skills

Responsibilities

The primary task will be to recruit families in your region and then place students with them when supplied the student profiles from this Head Office. We have pasted below a copy of an advert that has worked well for us here and in other parts of the world.

When a potential teacher replies to the advert, you or we will send them a copy of our Home Tuition brochure and details of the family payments together with the Terms of Agreement and Teacher Application forms.

When the teachers have returned them, you will visit them to approve the teacher, the teacher’s qualifications, the family and the accommodation. You must see the original qualification certificates and then post, fax or e-mail copies of them to us. We will enter these details on our files.

The preferred requirement for all teachers is to hold an appropriate qualification for teaching foreign students such as TEFL, CELTA, TESOL, ARELS Trinity One to One, or similar qualification, preferably also with a degree.

Occasionally we can use teachers with a good degree and academic background who do not hold a qualification for teaching a second language and with two years experience of Home Tuition teaching. This will particularly apply if they have a strong business or professional background and could take students on our Business and General language courses.

If you have any doubts about a teacher, the family, or the accommodation, do not take them on board. It is far better for us to refuse a booking because we can’t place the student with a suitable family, than to have problems by placing students with unsuitable families

Students usually book through agents and when we get the student details, we send you a Student Profile to match the student with the most suitable family. You tell us who this will be and we send the details to the agent. The agent will also give us the flight details for you to arrange the arrival and departure transfers.

We will send you a supply of Certificates of Attendance and Course Reports as a back up but will issue these to the teachers for each student. The teacher has to complete the Course Report at the end of the Course and return the Hours sheet to us after the student has signed it to say they were satisfied and received the correct number of hours and were happy with the standard of teaching. The teacher also gives the student a Certificate of Attendance.

Within 48 hours of the student being with the family, you should phone them and check that everything is all right. You need to speak directly to the student and not take the word of the teacher.

We will pay the families at the end of each week as soon as you are satisfied that the student is happy with the course, the teacher and the accommodation. If you have any doubts after your first phone call, then we would require you to visit the family and the student to personally check if everything is in order. This will also give you the opportunity to speak privately with the student. They may not have been completely open with you on the telephone if the teacher was listening.

If you do feel that there is a serious problem, then we must be informed immediately and another family must be found for the student.

Please make sure that the teachers are using our recognised course books and that the students are receiving the stipulated amount of hours. If they are on a 15 hours of General English programme, then that is exactly what they must receive. Time spent on social activities, shopping trips etc, although much appreciated by both the students and us, is not a substitute for formal lessons.

We will issue the teachers with the course books before the student arrives and include a plastic envelope for them to return the books and Course Reports to us when the student has left. The final week’s payment will be withheld until we receive this when we will pay this week and include the cost of the postage.

Teachers who teach full time during the day are not suitable as Home Tuition teachers. They must be available during the day to give the lessons one to one to the student in the home. Taking them with them to a school they may be teaching at, and letting them sit in on the lessons, is not acceptable. They can, of course, take them to school with them if they are working part time, but the students must still get the designated number of one to one lessons.

Course books which we have used successfully in the past for General English courses, and are still using, are the Headway books for short courses. They come in five levels to suit students from Beginner to Advanced.

These can generally be adapted to the requirements of teaching students one to one.

We also recommend that all teachers buy their own copy of Murphy’s “English Grammar in Use”, which they keep as a permanent reference.

If the students are taking a specialist language course such as banking, law or medicine, we will supply the required books.

With everyone having easy access to the internet, where our course fees are easily accessible, you may be asked why there seems to be a wide profit margin between what we charge the students and what we pay the teachers. The answer is that invariably, all our bookings come through agents, to whom we pay very hefty commissions which come out of our published course fees.