By Arnold Vis
We are passionate about teaching and living abroad, and all the adventure and personal growth that it brings.
As such, we want to help as many people as possible.
We appreciate everyone that takes the time to submit an application with us. So if we haven’t replied to you, please know that we have reviewed your application, but that there’s a reason we think we won’t be able to help you.
In this blog post, I’ll cover three possible reasons for this.
- Eligibility
As Impact Teaching, we are not a school ourselves, we are a UK based company with lots of relationships to schools, agencies and recruiters looking for teachers in a number of countries.
This means that the extent we can help you depends on the requirements of the government and schools in the country you want to teach in.
I am a Dutch passport holder, and when I went to teach in China in 2002, it was possible to obtain a work visa for me as a Dutch citizen. The rules for visas have since changed, and currently only candidates from the UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and South Africa that have a degree are eligible for a work visa to teach English in China.
So as an applicant today, I wouldn’t be able to obtain a work visa, and Impact Teaching could not fulfill its mission to help set up a safe, legal placement for me in China.
As such, we don’t respond to candidates that aren’t eligible for the program they applied for. All the eligibility requirements are outlined on the program pages
2. Candidates that are already in the country they want to teach in.
We sometimes get applicants from teachers living in Poland for our Poland program, or from those living in China for our China program.
We used to consider candidates in that position, but we no longer do.
It’s based on our experiences over the years, as we found that our program was rarely what these candidates look for.
It’s mostly to do with our program structure and the program fee.
We are set up to help candidates with the full process of moving abroad, in terms of finding a job, obtaining a visa, getting training and meeting people going at the same time.
Most of our programs have a fee for these services, and some a refundable holding deposit.
Over time, we found that teachers already living in the country they want to teach in are mostly looking for a job and not the other services, and are not willing to pay a fee.
That’s totally understandable, but for this reason we have decided not to consider candidates in this situation as what we offer wouldn’t be a good fit.
3. Specific circumstances affecting candidates from certain nationalities
There are additional other factors that make a successful move impossible at certain times.
At this moment in time, two examples come to mind.
South African candidates moving to Poland.
In recent years, a long waiting list has built up at the Polish embassies in South Africa. A waiting list is in place, where each week something like 20 people get to apply based on a lottery, with well over a 1000 people on the waiting list.
Needless to say, this is a frustrating process and it means there’s no guaranteed timeline for moving to Poland.
It’s affected a number of our candidates, and I deeply regret that. Until this situation resolves itself, we can’t take on any more candidates from South Africa (and a number of other African nationalities that would apply at the embassy in SA) for our Poland program.
Another example is candidates based in the Philippines applying to a number of countries, often Poland.
We have had a number of very successful teachers from the Philippines and we want to help. But we’ve found that the government in the Philippines requires a lot of additional paperwork to let candidates leave the country, which some of the schools struggle to provide. In a number of cases this meant a drawn out process that meant the teacher couldn’t go in the end. Based on this we can’t consider candidates
It does however mean that candidates who are currently outside the Philippines (for example in Thailand) wouldn’t face this problem, and would be invited for a call by us.
Thanks for reading, we greatly appreciate your time in applying with us and we want to help.
If what you read today isn’t good news given your situation, I hope it at least clarifies things and helps you with thinking about alternatives.
You can always contact me if you want more information, and I’ll help wherever I can.
My email address is: arnold@impact-
If you haven’t applied yet, you can do so here.
