When I started working with language teaching professionals as a coach, my focus was on stress management and burnout.
But after a while, I realised that it wasn’t really possible to tackle stress and burnout without addressing some of the problems causing them.
Many teachers were working long hours, often at unsociable times and, crucially, for very low pay.
No wonder they were feeling overwhelmed and stressed.
And what concerned me even more was that, rather than improving, pay and conditions in ELT seemed to be getting steadily worse.
Why is low pay such a problem in ELT?
Unfortunately, I think low pay in ELT reflects something that’s deeply ingrained in education as a whole.
You’ve probably seen the memes shared on social media about how ‘teachers teach for the outcome, not the income’.
There’s often a sense that educators shouldn’t expect to be paid particularly well because teaching is a vocation. The satisfaction of helping people learn and develop is supposed to be enough.
But surely it’s possible to care deeply about student outcomes AND teacher incomes?
Caring about your students doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also expect to earn enough to have a comfortable life, put something aside for the future and enjoy the occasional holiday.
And yet, for many teachers, those things are becoming increasingly difficult.
It’s getting worse
When I lived and worked abroad in the 1990s, I certainly wasn’t earning a fortune.
I spent around ten years teaching in different countries, and I didn’t manage to save much. To be fair, twenty-something me would probably have considered paying into a pension rather boring and unnecessary anyway.
But I was generally quite comfortable by local standards.
I could afford to travel, eat out regularly and enjoy living in another country. There was a sense that, although you weren’t going to get rich teaching English, you could have a pretty good lifestyle.
Compare that with what many younger teachers experience today.
I regularly see jobs advertised in European cities with relatively high living costs at rates that would make it extremely difficult to live independently, let alone save anything.
And then there are the large online teaching platforms, where teachers compete in an international market and can find themselves under enormous pressure to keep their rates low.
The problem is that pay in much of the industry simply hasn’t kept pace with the increasing cost of living.
What used to be a modest but manageable income has become increasingly difficult to live on.
And the usual advice to gain more qualifications and experience doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
To become a CELTA tutor, for example, you need considerable experience and advanced qualifications. Yet the rates on offer for this highly skilled work often seem scarcely better than when I was training teachers nearly twenty years ago.
It’s difficult to see how that’s sustainable.
Experienced teachers are leaving the profession, while others find themselves working more and more hours simply to make ends meet.
Why do we accept such low pay?
I think part of the problem is that there’s still a real reluctance within education to talk openly about money.
When I was working as a CELTA tutor from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, I don’t remember spending much time discussing the financial realities of becoming an English language teacher.
If money came up at all, it was probably to warn trainees that they shouldn’t expect to earn very much.
And I think there’s a tendency for teachers to accept that low pay is simply part of the profession.
We often assume that gaining another qualification, working harder or taking on additional responsibilities will eventually lead to better earnings.
But if the underlying pay structure doesn’t reward that additional expertise, there’s only so far those strategies can take you.
There’s also a wider issue around financial literacy.
Most of us weren’t taught very much at school about managing money, understanding the real cost of borrowing or making provision for retirement. And when you work in a profession where earning a good income can almost feel like something to apologise for, it becomes even harder to have open conversations about what our work is worth.
I think we need to become much more comfortable discussing money, both within the profession and in our own businesses.
What can we do about it?
The wider problem of low pay in ELT isn’t something individual teachers can solve on their own.
Employers and organisations have a responsibility to offer fair pay and reasonable working conditions. And as a profession, we need to be much more willing to challenge the idea that teaching should be poorly rewarded simply because it’s rewarding work.
But there are also things individual teachers can do to improve their own circumstances.
This was one of the reasons my coaching work gradually shifted towards helping language professionals develop their own freelance businesses.
I started helping teachers explore how they could use their existing skills and experience to work directly with clients who genuinely valued their expertise and were willing to pay appropriately for it.
For some, that meant moving away from general English teaching and specialising in a particular area. For others, it involved developing a more distinctive offer, changing their business model or learning how to communicate the value of their work more effectively.
Of course, going freelance isn’t automatically the answer.
Running your own business brings a whole new set of challenges, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll earn more simply because you’re working for yourself.
But it can give you opportunities to make decisions that are difficult when you’re employed by a language school or working for an online platform.
You can decide who you want to work with, what services you offer, how you deliver them and what you charge.
And importantly, you can start thinking about your pricing in terms of the value you provide and what you need your business to earn, rather than simply accepting whatever hourly rate happens to be offered.
Earning more doesn’t have to mean working more
One thing I often see when working with freelance language teachers is that they’re trying to increase their income by finding more students or adding more teaching hours.
But there’s a limit to how many hours anyone can work, particularly when you factor in preparation, admin, marketing and everything else involved in running a business.
Sometimes, the answer lies in reviewing your pricing, developing a more valuable offer or finding ways to help clients that don’t depend entirely on selling individual hours of your time.
That might involve specialist one-to-one work, group programmes, corporate training or a different combination of services.
The important thing is to design a business that makes financial sense for you and provides something your clients genuinely value.
This isn’t always easy, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight.
But we have opportunities today that simply weren’t available to most freelance teachers when I started my career.
Technology has made it easier to reach clients internationally, develop different kinds of offers and run a business without the overheads that would once have been involved.
The challenge is learning how to make good use of those opportunities.
Let’s stop feeling guilty about wanting to earn more
Perhaps the biggest thing I’d like to see change is the idea that caring about money somehow makes you less committed to education.
Most teachers I know aren’t particularly interested in making vast amounts of money for its own sake.
They want to be able to pay their bills without worrying, enjoy their lives, take time off when they need it and have some security for the future.
And quite a few would simply like to be able to work reasonable hours without feeling permanently exhausted.
I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
We need excellent teachers, trainers and teacher educators, and we should want those people to be able to build rewarding, sustainable careers.
And if you’re a freelance language professional, I’d really encourage you to think about whether the way you’re currently working is giving you the income and lifestyle you want.
Because there’s no reason why doing valuable, meaningful work and earning a decent living shouldn’t go together.
Want to earn more from your freelance language teaching business?
If you’re working hard but not earning what you’d like, it may be worth taking another look at your pricing, the clients you’re working with and the way you’ve structured your services.
I’ve brought together some of my most useful videos, articles and practical advice on pricing, money mindset and different ways of earning in my Earn More Resource Centre.