Part Two of my new TEFL accreditation series, following on from my piece on the Open and Distance Learning Quality Council.
This one will be considerably shorter, since there is no such thing as a course accredited by IATEFL. Why anyone would believe that an international non-profit organisation would pick one or two of the hundreds of TEFL courses that are available and then fly themselves round the world to moderate their courses I really can’t imagine, but they obviously do no such thing. UniTEFL Thailand have removed the words “accredited” above the IATEFL and TESOL logos since I wrote about them (meaning that now they are just abusing the logo in a way that IATEFL clearly states that they cannot, as I wrote about here). That leaves just one result of googling “accredited by IATEFL”, so make room in my gallery of TEFL infamy for:
ITTO Boston
I have given them several chances to take this down, and they have even admitted by email that IATEFL does not accredit courses. But there still is the lie as clear as day on their comparison page “Accredited by IATEFL – Yes”. That’ll be yes with the meaning “Obviously not, because even we’ve admitted that such a thing is impossible and so we have at least one big porkie on our website”, then. That being the case, one has to wonder about all their other claims too, I would say.
UPDATE: Have just found that one Notting Hill College UAE is also guilty of this, along with major logo abuse. Will write to them now and see what they have to say.
TEFLtastic 
Notting Hill College have got back to me, so hopeful of making some progress there. Still think this shouldn’t be my job though!
https://tefltastic.wordpress.com/tesol/abusing-tesol-name/
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ITTO have made a change on their website following up from my requests. It now says “Institutional Member of IATEFL – Yes No No”. That doesn’t prove anything about their standards and I don’t know how they can be sure of the membership status of those competing courses, but it’s an improvement.
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Notting Hill College have now taken out the reference to IATEFL on their Facebook page, so that’s three out of three for schools who changed their websites with a little bit of online pressure!
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Done.
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Thank you!
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bestonlineteflcourse
Here’s another site pretending to be accredited by IATEFL.
/accreditation.shtml states “TEFL Education is accredited by organizations like IATEFL that stands for the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language”
Reading through the site should put people on guard as his English is particularly atrocious.
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