With Australia’s borders now closed, Australia’s English language schools are now facing collapse:
Many students and overseas visitors who are enrolled are fleeing Australia while they can, fearing that flights will be cancelled and travel will become more difficult if they wait much longer.
And because Australia’s borders are closed and international travel has frozen, there is no hope on the horizon for new enrolments into the English language teaching sector, which usually earns $2.4bn a year in export revenue and employs nearly 10,000 people.
Ian Pratt, the managing director of Lexis English, which has six centres in Australia and employs 330 people, said his business had suffered “massive cancellations”…. he said the private part of the English tuition sector was facing extinction in a matter of weeks.
“Industry-wide, I’m hearing people saying two weeks, I’m hearing people say six weeks,” he said…
The industry faced the prospect of having no English schools left by the end of the year, “if not mid-year”,
Phil Honeywood, chief executive of the International Education Association of Australia, said the health of the English tuition sector was the “canary in the coalmine” for the whole of the $40bn education export industry, because so many international students arriving for tertiary study started with an English course.
Add universities and vocational education and training (VET) into the mix, and it is clear that Australia’s education sector – which generated $16 billion of fees last year – is facing many billions of dollars in losses:
From the outset, MB has been very vocal in advocating for a more moderate intake of international students, which reached absurd levels of nearly one million enrolments last year:
One positive outcome from the coronavirus outbreak is that it will force numbers lower, hopefully back to sustainable levels.
