Spend five minutes helping English UK campaign for ELT recovery
The English UK public affairs team are focused on campaigning, but the most effective way to get the message to Government is via local MPs, whose first duty is to their constituents. The Government and its officials have noticed the large number of letters coming in from and about ELT, so we need to keep this going.
Now we would like you to send a copy of our 14-point roadmap to your local MP and persuade as many staff as possible to do the same. It's particularly important to do this if anyone connected to your centre lives in a constituency where the MP is a minister.
Email template for your MP
Here's an email template for you to send to the MP. The bullet points at the end are in order of importance: there are a lot of asks for your MP there so we suggest you drop the first bullet point if you've already written to your MP about rates relief, and drop the last one if you haven't.
I am the [ROLE] of [NAME] language centre in your constituency, and I wanted to share with you a new report outlining the benefits of UK ELT, the damage done to our industry by Covid-19 and how the Government can help.
As you will see, our industry has been devastated by the pandemic, with student numbers down by 82% and a projected loss of half a billion pounds across 400 English language teaching centres. Just seven per cent of staff have been working as usual. Our businesses depend on inbound tourism which we don't expect to restart until well into 2021.
Teaching English usually needs little help from the Government: instead, we support the UK economy with 550,000 students bringing in £1.4bn annually, creating 35,000 jobs and underpinning our £20bn international education sector.
There is a risk all these benefits will go to our competitors in the future, so we are asking for your support in getting the Government to help us.
What we need falls into three categories: short and medium-term business support for ELT centres, tailored visas and immigration, and national marketing for our sector.
It would help us and our staff, host families and everyone who benefits from English language students in our constituency if you would:
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Write to Michael Gove in the Cabinet Office, Robert Jenrick at the MHCLG and Alok Sharma at the Treasury to ask that ELT be specifically included in the business rates relief scheme (we estimate this would cost no more than £18m).
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Write to Michael Gove and/ or Alok Sharma to make the case for extended support, including furlough, for ELT until March 2021. ELT is a seasonal industry and for many teaching centres, missing the important Easter and summer peaks will mean little or no income until spring 2021.
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Write to Priti Patel at the Home Office asking to extend visa validity periods for those unable to travel during the pandemic and to waive any additional fee if new information is required, and to keep ID-card travel for under-18 EU/EEA/ Swiss group travel.
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Write to Graham Stuart at the DIT and Rishi Sunak at the Treasury to increase available financial support for UK exports, offer innovation and enterprise grants to UK ELT, increase government support for the Study UK campaign and make GREAT funding available in key source markets
We are very grateful for your help.
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