Throughout my career in language training, quality is a word that comes back again and again. In this profession we’re becoming beholden to auditors, labels, clients and governments who wag their fingers and assume we don’t know what we’re doing unless we have the correct procedures in place. Apparently, if we slavishly follow these procedures, then we know that our training is working properly.

This is a load of rubbish. Utter cobblers. You could take a certified ELT teacher, and train him once a month, and make sure all the paperwork is filled in after each lesson, and make sure the hygiene and security protocols are in place, and make sure a test was taken at the beginning and at the end, and make sure the materials and lesson plans were fully prepared each time.

However, none of this means that the lessons will be any good and that the student will reach his learning objectives.

A language lesson is not a checklist. I’ve worked on language training plans including hundreds of students for large companies and some had enforced lesson plans with 10-minute sections for each activity. The quality and purchasing managers loved it. The teachers hated it, as did the students.