Our story
From the Aussie Outback...
Back in the early 90s, a woman called Deirdre took a little time out to travel around the world. She did a stint as a bus driver in the Aussie Outback. She taught English out in Japan, then she settled down in Greece for a bit and taught English up in the mountains.
To a cold bedsit in Leeds
She had a great time, saw the world and earned enough money from teaching to fund her travels. So when she finally got back to England, she decided to set up a TEFL training company and help others get out there and have the kind of adventures she had. That’s how i-to-i started – with lots of late nights and cheap coffee in a cold bedsit in Leeds.
A new type of TEFL course
When we started out, if you wanted to take a TEFL course the only options were the full-on four week CELTA courses or a post-graduate degree. We believed that there was no need for you to spend a month’s wages and four weeks of your life to learn the basics of teaching English as a foreign language. So we identified all the most important bits, condensed them down into an intensive two day course and created our unique Weekend TEFL courses.
Classroom courses all over the place
We started the new weekend TEFL courses in Leeds in 1994. Then we got a little more adventurous and took the i-to-i bus along the M62 to Manchester and did a few there. Next came London. Bristol. Edinburgh. Dublin. New York. Melbourne. And pretty soon we were teaching all over the place. In fact, in 2009 we launched a weekend TEFL course for China Interns in Beijing.
Study TEFL online? You must be bonkers!
When we created the world’s first online TEFL course back in 2001, people said we were crazy. But we did it. And it’s helped more than 60,000 people learn how to teach English as a foreign language. The course was (and still is) pretty unique. It allows you to study all the most important TEFL skills and knowledge from anywhere on the planet. And the Online TEFL certificate is now accepted pretty much everywhere on the planet.
We should help people find work too
Once we had all the TEFL training side sorted, we thought ‘We should help people find work too’. We knew how hard it was for newly qualified TEFLers to find work with reputable schools and language institutes overseas. So we found a few of the most respected and trustworthy ones and got things rolling. Our TEFL Jobs abroad now offer people the chance to get full TEFL training and a job overseas. We can now find people work in China, Japan, South Korea, Ecuador, Indonesia and the Czech Republic.
Oh blimey, haven’t you come a long way?
Yep! We now have offices in Leeds (it’s a bit bigger than the bedsit, but still gets really nippy when the winds blow in off the Pennines), Ireland, Australia and the USA. We employ about 100 people around the world and we train about 15,000 people every year.
