English language schools face yet another crippling summer because strict COVID travel restrictions still apply to Brazilian students who would normally make up the majority of adult students in Malta.
A major operator in the sector, Andrew Mangion, said it would soon be too late to save the market unless Brazil was removed from Malta’s dark red list.
This means prospective Brazilian students must either enter quarantine for 10 days on arrival or travel to another green list country and stay there for two weeks before heading to Malta.
Brazilian students are mostly adults with high spending power and whose average stay on the island is longer than a month
No English language student would be willing to go through so much trouble when they could easily travel to another country with no such restrictions, said Mangion, the executive chairman and CEO of EC Malta, a major English language school with operations in several countries.
Majority of adult language students from Brazil
In 2019, the absolute majority of adult students in Malta’s TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) schools came from Brazil, Mangion said.
Caroline Tissot, FELTOM (Federation of English Language Teaching Organisations) CEO, said the Brazilian market was a very important one.
Two years ago, it was Malta’s third-largest market for its language schools. Italy had a 12 per cent share, Columbia 9.1 per cent and Brazil was right behind with nine per cent.
However, Brazilian students are mostly adults with high spending power whose average stay on the island is longer than a month. The Brazilian market is what keeps the schools afloat during the shoulder months, Tissot pointed out.
Malta’s main competitors for the Brazilian market are Ireland and Canada, both of which have opened their borders and are taking bookings from Brazilian students, she added.
Tissot also said that once an agent for this market is lost, it is very difficult to draw them back.
Language schools hanging in the balance
Maltese English language schools have been practically decimated by the pandemic.
By May 2020, within weeks of the first registered case in Malta, the sector had already been badly hit by cancellations, which threw many of the schools into dire financial straits.
After reopening last July following a second lockdown, foreign students were found to be partly behind a spike in COVID cases and the schools were ordered to close their doors again just weeks later.
The move was described by FELTOM at the time as “unwarranted and disproportionate”.
Mangion said that now, after a long period of uncertainty in the sector, English language schools were once again being left hanging in the balance.
Operators in the industry could not understand the reasoning behind the restrictions on students from Brazil, he said.
The reason being given was that “the level of testing in Brazil is still too low”. But Malta was receiving travellers from the UK and Scandinavian countries even though these countries had completely removed all testing, he maintained.
FELTOM in talks with the government
The federation has been in talks with the public health department as well as with the Office of the Prime Minister in an attempt to resolve the situation but no agreement has been reached.
Mangion said the schools had welcomed the announcement made by the authorities a few weeks ago that all restrictions would be removed.
But they were still waiting for the removal of the measures currently putting off a big share of their market.
English language schools were not asking for handouts but only for borders to be re-opened so that TEFL schools could once again operate unencumbered, he said.
Questions sent to public health authorities about when Brazil and other countries would be taken off the dark red travel list remain unanswered.