English Australia, which represents over 120 member colleges providing English language tuition, is “ramping up” its efforts to actively engage with education agents and launching a new Partner Agency Program after its agent survey, published this week, revealed that more than a third of agents are unfamiliar with the organisation.
When asked if they had heard of English Australia before, only 65% of surveyed agents responded positively. This is just a 2% increase on last year’s recognition rate. Even fewer agents, 32%, said they knew what EA represents.
Despite no real improvement from the previous year, Executive Director Sue Blundell said the 65% recognition rate was “promising”.
“We still have some work to do in educating agents about how we can assist them. This is a process that will take some time.”
She highlighted that 63% of the agents who were aware of the organisation said they were positively influenced by English Australia members when choosing partner institutions, even though the figure is 1% less than last year.
“It is difficult to track trends with this kind of survey as the pool of respondents is different each time,” Blundell told The PIE News.
“The survey showed that 20% of responding agents didn’t recruit students for Australia so we actually think that [63%] is a high benchmark for agents to be influenced by English Australia membership in their choice of colleges to work with and are pleased that this was maintained.”
This new programme, which will launch in November, will mean some agents will gain the official recognition of English Australia and will feature on its website, based on recommendations from its members.
“We still have some work to do in educating agents about how we can assist them,” Blundell said. “This is a process that will take some time. We will, however, soon be launching our Partner Agency Program which will give agents the opportunity to work more closely with us and gain a better understanding.”
Improvements were seen in agents’ awareness of services with 25% of survey respondents saying they know which services English Australia offers that are relevant to agents, up by 5% compared to February last year.
And the proportion of agents who recognised the association’s logo has also risen from 48% last year to 58% this year.
Launched in the middle of this year, 2014’s agent survey was taken by a total of 783 agents from 76 countries.
