EC English and ILAC’s closures tell an uncomfortable truth about Canada’s ELT sector

The past week has been extraordinary. On September 14, EC English closed all 25 of its schools worldwide. Four days later, ILAC ceased operations and filed for bankruptcy protection. Two of the most recognisable names in international language education were suddenly gone.

These aren’t small operators. EC had been operating for 35 years. ILAC had built almost 30 years of history in the sector. Between them, thousands of students, employees, teachers, agents and host communities have been affected. Languages Canada is now helping deal with more than 1,800 displaced language students resulting from the two closures.

This isn’t simply a story about two companies. It should cause the entire language industry to pause and reflect.

For decades, the industry has celebrated the growth of large language school operators. More students. More campuses. More destinations. More agents. More centralised marketing. More purchasing power. More economies of scale. More standardised programs. Bigger was supposed to mean better. But somewhere along the way, I think we started confusing scale with quality.

The business practices of the largest operators have gradually become the industry’s expectations. Students increasingly become units of volume: enrolments, student weeks, occupancy rates and revenue per student. Recruitment becomes a numbers game. Agents are measured by production. Schools compete on price. Programs become standardised so they can be replicated across multiple locations.

All of this makes perfect sense if you are manufacturing a product. But language education isn’t a manufactured product.

The student sitting in a classroom isn’t a unit of inventory. They may be a 19-year-old travelling abroad for the first time, a professional investing in their career, or someone who has spent a significant portion of their family’s savings to improve their English. They don’t need an efficient production system. They need an educational experience. And that distinction is critically important.

The relentless competition on price is another problem. Large operators have the scale to offer aggressive discounts and promotions. But there is a basic economic reality that we shouldn’t ignore: if the price keeps going down, something else eventually has to give. Class sizes. Staffing. Student services. Activities. Facilities. Teacher compensation. Personal attention. Compassion. Care.

Thendustry has also allowed recruitment to become increasingly transactional. Agents are essential partners in international education, but we have created a system where the conversation often becomes less about which school is right for the student and more about which school offers the best commission or promotion. That isn’t necessarily the fault of agents. It is a consequence of the system we have built.

We have also become very good at selling destinations without necessarily making the destination part of the education. Toronto, Vancouver, London, Sydney, and other cities become brands that can be packaged and sold around the world. But studying English in a city should mean more than attending classes in that city. The community should be part of the education.

Students should meet local people, volunteer, participate in community organisations, experience the culture and develop relationships outside the classroom. Those experiences can be just as important to language development as what happens during a lesson.

And there is another consequence of this model that doesn’t get discussed enough: geographic concentration.

When schools need large volumes of international students to fill classrooms, they naturally gravitate toward the destinations that already have the strongest international brands and the deepest recruitment networks. That creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Students want to go where other international students are, agents sell the destinations they know, and schools continue to concentrate in the same handful of major cities.

The result is that Canada’s language-school industry has become heavily concentrated in Toronto and Vancouver, while many other Canadian communities with excellent universities, colleges, employers, cultural experiences and opportunities for genuine immersion remain largely overlooked. That’s not because those communities offer a poorer educational experience. It’s because the economics of scale favour concentration.

International students shouldn’t have to choose between a few major cities to receive a high-quality Canadian language education. Canada has an enormous diversity of communities, and language learning can be much more meaningful when students are actually immersed in a local community rather than surrounded primarily by other international students.

And then there is technology. I am not anti-technology. Quite the opposite. AI and digital learning will transform language education, and much of that transformation will be positive. But if technology is primarily being used to reduce the cost of delivering education rather than to improve the student’s experience, we need to ask where we are going. The more artificial our world becomes, the more valuable genuine human interaction becomes.

That brings us back to the events of this past week. When two major operators with decades of history disappear within a week, the obvious question is: What went wrong at those companies? But perhaps the more important question is: What have we built into the business model of the industry?

I don’t believe the answer is to condemn large operators. Large language schools have brought investment, professionalism and innovation to our industry

Have we created a sector that rewards volume more than relationships? Efficiency more than experience? Price more than value? Centralisation more than local connection? And are the large schools so dependent on scale that they become less resilient when market conditions change?

I don’t believe the answer is to condemn large operators. Large language schools have brought investment, professionalism and innovation to our industry. They have helped create opportunities for students and employees around the world. But size should never become the definition of quality.

This is where I believe independent language schools have something important to contribute to the future of the industry. An independent school cannot compete with a multi-national operator on the number of campuses it has. It cannot offer the purchasing power or global marketing budget of a large chain.

But it can offer something fundamentally different.

It can know its students personally. It can know its teachers. It can build genuine relationships with its community. It can make decisions quickly. It can create programs around people rather than around a standardized corporate model.

And it can treat the local community not as a backdrop for an international student experience, but as part of the curriculum itself. That’s not inefficiency. That’s the product.

Perhaps the lesson from EC and ILAC isn’t that big language schools are bad or that independent schools are automatically better. Perhaps the lesson is simply that we need to stop equating scale with success.

The language industry should be asking a different question. Not, “How many students can we process?” But: “What kind of experience can we create for every student who puts their trust in us?” Because language education is fundamentally about human connection, and perhaps we’ve spent too long trying to make a human experience behave like a commodity.

It’s time to rethink the model.

In the meantime, I’ll be at Heartland this week, greeting the new students, asking where they’re from, and letting them know we’re here to help.

A version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn