I spend a lot of my time looking at the ELT sector through numbers.
Student volumes. Student weeks. Average length of stay. Source markets. Market share. Growth and decline. And the numbers have been telling us for some time that this is a difficult period for language travel. But the past few weeks have reminded me that there is something our datasets do not measure particularly well.
Trust.
The events surrounding EC, ILAC and the difficulties we have seen among providers in Ireland have been painful to watch.
These are different organisations with different circumstances, and I do not want to speculate about what happened inside individual businesses. But when established providers experience serious difficulties in such a short period of time, there is a wider question the sector cannot avoid.
What does this do to the confidence of the student who is considering paying several thousand euros for a course six months from now?
Or to the parent sending a 16-year-old abroad?
Or to the agent recommending a school to a family?
ELT sells something that requires an extraordinary amount of trust
Language travel is unusual.
We ask students to pay for something that often exists months into the future, in a country they may never have visited, to an organisation they may know only through a website or an education agent. Then we ask them to book a flight, arrange a visa and sometimes transfer additional money for accommodation.
The whole model depends on confidence.
Confidence in the school.
Confidence in the agent.
Confidence in the destination.
And, ultimately, confidence that the wider system will protect the student if something goes wrong.
That is why what has happened recently matters beyond the organisations directly involved. The immediate challenge is, of course, supporting affected students and staff.
The longer-term challenge is making sure that a difficult period for individual providers does not become a confidence problem for the wider ELT sector.
The commercial environment has undoubtedly become harder
We should also be realistic about the environment in which schools are operating.
Our latest BONARD Global ELT Annual Reportrecorded 901,877 students and 5.82 million student weeks across eight major destinations in 2025.
Student numbers declined by 10% between 2024 and 2025.
Student weeks declined by 23% between 2024 and 2025.
It was the second consecutive year of decline.
Perhaps more importantly, student weeks are falling faster than student numbers.
That matters enormously for a sector where revenue is closely connected to how long students stay.
Students are still travelling to learn English. But many are staying for shorter periods. They are more sensitive to accommodation and living costs. Visa policy is affecting conversion. Booking patterns are changing. And geopolitical and economic uncertainty can alter demand remarkably quickly.
At the same time, schools still need classrooms, teachers, staff, accommodation networks and infrastructure.
There is very little comfort about that equation.
And yet I would be careful about turning recent closures into a simple narrative that ELT itself is in decline.
It is not what the data tells us.
Some destinations and segments are growing. South Africa and New Zealand both recorded growth in our latest global data. Junior demand behaves differently from adult demand. Source markets are moving in different directions.
And as we move through 2026, we are beginning to see something else too.
There are signs of greater stability beneath the headline numbers
2026 will still be a difficult year for many providers. In several destinations, we expect volumes to remain below 2025 levels.
But that is not the whole picture we are seeing.
Some destinations are beginning to show greater stability. And, perhaps more importantly, we are increasingly seeing individual schools performing well even in markets where the overall numbers remain under pressure.
Those success stories matter.
They show that the current environment is not simply separating growing destinations from declining ones. There is also increasing variation within the same market.
Some providers are finding growth in different source markets. Others are adapting their programme mix, building stronger junior or adult business, changing the way they work with agents or responding more effectively to shorter booking cycles and changing student expectations.
That is encouraging because it suggests that the sector is not simply waiting for demand to return.
Parts of it are adapting.
I do not expect 2026 suddenly to become a growth year across global ELT. There will still be difficult results and significant pressure in some markets.
But if more destinations begin to stabilise, and if more schools find models that work under today's conditions, that can start to mitigate the overall decline.
It could give the sector something it badly needs: a more stable base going into 2027.
Demand for English has not disappeared.
The challenge is finding the models, markets and programmes through which that demand can once again translate into sustainable language travel.
What happened next is perhaps the more important story
There is one part of the last few weeks that I do not want to get lost among the headlines.
When students suddenly needed help, the sector responded.
Associations mobilised.
Schools that compete with one another every day offered places to affected students.
Agents worked to find alternatives for their clients.
Accommodation providers and other partners became part of the solution.
And people who had just lost, or were facing the loss of, their own jobs continued helping students.
In Canada, Languages Canada and its members moved quickly to support and place students affected by EC, before facing another enormous task only days later following ILAC. In the UK, English UK activated its student protection arrangements and member centres stepped in. In Ireland, English Education Ireland worked with EC Dublin and its Protection of Enrolled Learners insurance provider to transfer affected students to other accredited member schools. In Malta, FELTOM and its member schools came together to support affected students, while English South Africa and its members also stepped in following the closure of EC Cape Town.
Across four very different destinations, the response had something important in common: schools that would normally compete for the same students put competition aside and worked together.
There are many people involved in this work whose names will never appear in an article or industry report.
I think they deserve enormous credit.
Because at a moment when confidence in ELT could easily have been damaged further, the sector demonstrated something very important:
Student protection is not only a policy written on a website. It is a network of people willing to act when it is actually needed.
But goodwill cannot be the only safety net
The response has been impressive.
It should also make us ask whether we rely too heavily on that goodwill.
If the market has become less predictable, student protection needs to be designed for a less predictable market.
Are existing protection mechanisms sufficient?
Do students understand what happens to their tuition and accommodation payments if a provider fails?
Are agents sufficiently protected when they have significant numbers of students with one provider?
Are there warning mechanisms that can identify financial stress earlier?
And how do we protect students without creating an impossible additional burden for schools that are already operating on tighter margins?
I do not pretend to have all of the answers.
But I think these are now more important questions than another debate about whether ELT volumes will be up or down next year.
Perhaps resilience should become one of the ways we measure the sector
For years, we have measured the health of ELT primarily through student numbers and student weeks.
We will continue to do that.
But perhaps we also need to think much more seriously about resilience.
Not resilience as a nice word in a conference presentation.
Financial resilience.
Student protection.
Diversification of source markets.
Ability to respond to sudden visa changes.
Sustainable relationships between schools and agents.
The ability to adapt programme portfolios when student behaviour changes.
And mechanisms that allow the sector to absorb shocks without students carrying the consequences.
Because there might be more shocks.
They may come from regulation, geopolitics, currencies, aviation, accommodation or something we have not anticipated yet. The strongest ELT sector will not necessarily be the one that returns to the highest student numbers fastest. It may be the one that can absorb those shocks while continuing to protect the people who trusted it.
And perhaps this is also where the success stories we are beginning to see in 2026 become important. The schools finding growth today are doing so in a very different environment from the one the industry enjoyed during its strongest years.
Understanding why they are succeeding may tell us as much about the future of ELT as understanding why other providers are struggling.
This has been a painful reminder of what ELT actually is
It is easy for those of us working with industry data to talk about 900,000 students as a market.
They are not a market when their school closes.
They are individual people, often thousands of kilometres from home, wondering what happens on Monday morning.
And behind them are teachers, school staff, agents, host families and many others whose livelihoods are connected to this industry.
The past few weeks have exposed some uncomfortable vulnerabilities in ELT.
We should not minimise them.
We should learn from them.
But they have also shown something that no market report could capture.
When the system was tested, people across the sector stepped forward.
And at the same time, underneath some very difficult headline numbers, there are providers and destinations beginning to find their way forward.
That does not mean the difficult period is over. I do not think it is.
But perhaps 2026 can become the year in which the decline begins to moderate, successful models become clearer and the sector starts building towards greater stability in 2027.
There are difficult questions ahead about financial resilience, student protection and trust.
There are also increasingly important questions about what is working, where it is working and what the rest of the sector can learn from it.
For an industry whose future depends so heavily on trust, both conversations matter.
We need to understand where the vulnerabilities are.
But we also need to recognise, and learn from, the parts of ELT that are proving remarkably resilient.
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