This month, Leinster College become the most recent institution to shut its doors following new hardline regulation put in place by the Irish government after it was revealed earlier this year a number of schools had violated visa regulations.

Government and stakeholders say at least 10 more schools will close as a result of the new government policy.

“We want to reassure agents that we’re very much open for business”

Under its new membership mandate MEI will carry out background checks on individual owners and vet limited companies that are behind the schools.

“What we are keen to do is to have a better filter system which would mean that when somebody is proposed we would do a check on the ownership through the companies registration office on who the beneficial owners are,” MEI CEO David O’Grady told The PIE News.

Until now, MEI schools only had to be accredited for a minimum of two years– by ACELS or the British Council– and then have been proposed or seconded by a member.

The organisation’s new regulation will also check a school’s physical capacity to have the number of students it is registered for after it was revealed that Leinster College had 1,800 students on its books but capacity for only around 80 students.

MEI will disclose further details of its new strengthened criteria to its 49 members on December 18 at its AGM.

Despite the news of school closures dominating headlines, the ELT market in Ireland as a whole has remained bouyant with providers saying summer results were strong and overall student numbers for both junior and adult programmes either consistent or up on last year. Official statistics  on the sector will be available in the new year.

O’Grady also noted that where student numbers have lost ground in countries such as Spain, it has made up for this in emerging markets like Russia and the UAE.

Next month MEI is working alongside Enterprise Ireland and the the Irish embassy to host a “Choose Ireland” event in Seoul. “We want to reassure agents who have either been affected or put off by this whole mess that we’re very much open for business.”

Elsewhere MEI hopes Ireland can “reestablish” itself in the Brazilian market and while it does have good connections with BELTA agencies, O’Grady said work needs to be done to educate Brazilian agents that Ireland should not be wrongly seen as a migrant destination.

From January next year the government’s new regulatory framework, the International Education Mark (IEM), will legally require all schools to have a learner protection policy as well as on-site inspections, a new code of practice, and heightened scrutiny around documentation and quality assurance procedures.

Additionally, the new regulation, which has been three years in the making, will merge the different regulatory authorities of universities, higher education, further education and English language organisations in a bid  to phase out remaining “bogus” schools in Ireland.

“All those originally four independent organisations have been merging, sometimes with glacial slowness, but it’s all happened now,” confirmed O’Grady.

He has also disclosed that while the school closures affected around 5,000 students as identified by the government’s Task Force, MEI has only been dealing “in the hundreds.”

“There was a huge disparity between the number of students that the Ministry of Justice had registered in schools that closed and the number of students that ultimately materialised”

“There was a huge disparity between the number of students that the Ministry of Justice had registered in schools that closed and the number of students that ultimately materialised,” said O’Grady.

“And this confirms our suspicions that these students weren’t bona fide students, but people who came with the purpose of trying to find work.”

O’Grady has also predicted that a further 10 or 12 “scam” schools are on the brink of closure, and won’t be able to survive financially once the new laws come into place.

“We’re talking about a group of about five, six or seven people who are the beneficial owners. It’s the same group that move from place to place. As one school closes, another one opens. It’s organised crime,” he said.