Get Started with One-to-One English Teaching (and Become Your Own Boss)

Do you want to become your own boss teaching English? Keep reading.

Taking the leap from teaching groups in a school to becoming your own boss teaching English one-to-one can be exhilarating and daunting.

On the plus side, you can take control of your time, build a schedule around the life you want, and still increase your teaching income too. But, like most good things in life, it does come with risks.

Basically, every function that takes place in a language school will now fall to you, but if you see this as an opportunity to grow, then you can really expand your skillset and develop your knowledge of things like accounting, marketing, IT support and customer services. This variety can make life more interesting, and the skills you develop will help you in aspects of your teaching too – particularly if you teach Business English.

Getting qualified as a one-to-one English teacher

Whether you are teaching English one-to-one after working in a language school, or starting your teaching career as a one-to-one English teacher, it’s worth getting qualified. Teaching English one-to-one isn’t the same as teaching groups of students, so doing a specialist course and getting a qualification in individual instruction will help both your confidence and with your credibility. Most English teachers start with a recognised course like the Cambridge CELTA and then go on to specialise with a course such as the Teaching English One-to-One course .

Who will you teach one-to-one English to?

One important decision you will have to make when becoming your own boss is: Who is your target market? You may feel that you are willing to teach anyone, but marketing to the whole world is complex and costly, so it may be better to define a niche market where you think you can have the most impact and focus your marketing and social media activity on that specific niche. Perhaps you’re great with young learners, or teenagers or business English. Decide which it is and gear your personal brand to reflect that. For example, if you specialize in private English lessons for executives or young learners, make that clear in your messaging.

Marketing your one-to-one English teaching business

As an independent one-to-one English teacher, you’ll need to start finding your own students. You may already have lots of students who want to have lessons with you, but over time those will leave, and you’ll need to make sure you have other students to replace them.

Marketing can be expensive and may also not be very cost effective. To start with it’s best to build your market through social media postings. Have a regular schedule of sharing tips, links to articles or useful tools that can help your students. This helps you to build credibility and authority and when potential students are checking you out, they should see an impressive presence that boosts their confidence. Think about how you appear online and make sure what’s visible looks good and supports your personal brand.
You might want to offer some discounts or the first class for free. One of the best ways to get students though is through recommendation by your existing students, so think about what you can offer to any student who recommends a friend to sign up with you.

If you would prefer a softer launch into being your own boss and teaching English one-to-one, you could also open an account on Preply. Here, students will more be able to find you and book English classes directly.

Sell goals not lessons

As we all know, learning motivation tends to rise and fall over time and students can start to get bored or demotivated. If you have students who are paying lesson by lesson then there’s risk that when they get demotivated, and they may leave. To avoid this, try to sell lessons in batches and, better still, link these to a goal or a custom-designed course for your students. If they’ve paid for a series of English lessons that lead to the achievement of a language learning goal, then they are more likely to push through when the motivation is low.

To do this, I recommend starting with a needs analysis to understand what the student wants to achieve from your lessons and then help them formulate a learning plan. A student-centred approach can keep learners motivated and invested in their own success. Clearly defining learning objectives at the start of the course will help students stay focused and see their progress over time.

You can also use AI tools like ChatGPT to help you formulate goals and study plans for students. Be sure to edit them and discuss them with your students to make sure they are an appropriate fit.

Here’s a prompt template you can edit that will help you create a study plan for your student:

Act as an expert teacher.
Design a study plan for my student.
The student studies [number] hours each week.
The plan should cover [number] weeks.
At present the students’ level of English is [Add level] of the Common European Framework of Reference.
My student is [Describe the student].
My student’s aims are [Describe their aims].

Materials for teaching English one-to-one

You may be used to using a course book with students, and if there is one that fits closely to your students’ needs then that’s great; but remember that anything you can do to make the English lessons more specific to your students’ needs and interests increases your value as a teacher. Try to find relevant authentic materials that you can use with your students. This could be from online articles, videos, podcasts or infographics. Then build lessons around the material. Personalized learning helps keep lessons relevant and engaging. Effective lesson planning is key to making sure materials are both structured and adaptable. Consider scaffolding the material to gradually build your students’ skills and confidence over time.

There are lots of great tools available for building your own lesson materials, such as Genially and Canva. These tools can help you make your materials look professional and provide a range of templates and digital media that you can import into them. Using AI tools like ChatGPT can also help you to speed up the planning process and help you adapt your lessons to your students’ needs. You can find out more about in this in our article Top 10 AI tools for planning EFL lessons.

Where you teach your one-to-one English lessons

Whether you are teaching English one-to-one physically or online, you’ll need a space to do this. For online classes, make sure you have a quiet, well-lit space with good light and ventilation and not too many background distractions.

If you are teaching physical English lessons, you should ideally have a dedicated space prepared where you can do this that looks professional and that your students will be comfortable entering. It may be that you go to your client’s office or home.

If you’re going to be teaching online, then you’ll need a platform to use for this. There are lots to choose from these days, including Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, for example. The important thing is to choose one that is reliable, that you and your customers are comfortable with and which can help you manage your calendar of lessons. If none of these suit you, you can find more alternative platforms in our article 9 Free Alternatives to Zoom for Getting your Classroom Online.

Organising your work balance as a one-to-one English teacher

One of the great things about being your own boss is that it gives you some control over your time. You can choose when you work, your income, and if you decide to work more, you can earn more. The problem with this though is ensuring you have a balance between the two.

Turning down classes can be difficult, especially in the early days when you aren’t sure how your English teaching business will develop, but you must try to set some healthy boundaries and make sure you leave time for friends, family and most importantly yourself. Try to establish a cut-off time each day when you finish work and specific days when you don’t accept work and be strict with yourself. Having a separate phone for business-related matters that you can switch to silent or leave on your desk can help with this.
The best way to avoid overstretching yourself is to get organized. Be sure you have a digital calendar that you keep it up to date and have reminders of upcoming lessons or tasks that you need to get done. Be sure to blank out times when you’ll keep up with your accounts or work on your social media profile, as well as times when you’ll take a break and have a day off.

Short- and long-term goals for your one-to-one English teaching business

Set yourself some goals and have an exit strategy. When you first start teaching one-to-one as your own boss you probably see that as the end goal, but it’s wise to think further ahead. Having goals and an exit strategy can help guide some of the decisions you’ll need to make along the way. Goals can help you to evaluate how well your business is going. These could be based around growing the number of one-to-one students you have, increasing the amount of money you make or developing your social media reputation and following.

It might seem too early to think about how your one-to-one teaching business will end when you are just getting started, but this can really help you to make better decisions along the way. For example, imagine that in ten years’ time your English teaching business has grown, you’ve started employing other teachers. You’ve become an online school rather than just someone teaching English one-to-one to make ends meet. So, you are thinking about making a change. If you see this as a long-term goal, then you should probably consider becoming a company as soon as possible rather than a sole trader.

Another suggestion is to think about your company name and brand. Don’t attach it too much to your own name and personality – a company that’s centred on you will be much harder to sell and worthless without you. One thing that you can do to get started is to think of a name for your company that doesn’t include your own name. That will make it easier if one day you want to sell the company and do something else. Once you have your end goal established in your mind, you can ask yourself each time there is an important decision to make “How does this help move me closer to my goal?” and “How could this impact negatively on my end goal?”

You can set up shorter-term SMART Goals to keep yourself motivated and measure your progress. SMART goals are ones that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timebound. A typical SMART goal could be something like getting ten new online students in the next three months or creating a series of ten blog posts to share through social media within the next 10 weeks. Having a deadline for when you will complete your goal can really help keep you focused.

One-to-one English students become customers

One of the biggest changes I found when moving from teaching in a school to teaching English freelance one-to-one, was the way that it changed my relationship with my students. When your students are paying the school, your relationship with them is purely pedagogical, but when they are paying you directly, they become your customers as well as your students, and this puts much more responsibility on you to keep them happy.

To minimize the pressure and to try to keep the relationship pedagogical, try to get all the financial side of things sorted out before the classes start and then try to have payments automated, so there’s never any physical exchange or discussion of money during the English lessons.

Receving payments from students

If you want to teach one-to-one independently as your own boss, and especially if you want to teach English online, you’ll need to set up digital system to take payments. The first one you think of will probably be Paypal, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, it does have some limitations, and some people tend not to trust PayPal (I’ve always found it very safe and reliable).

Another platform worth trying is Stripe, one of the most trusted online payment systems available. It doesn’t cost anything to set up and it enables you to take international payments from credit cards and other payment systems from around the world. Stripe does take a small percentage of each payment though, just as any bank will do, but it’s very flexible, easy to use and can automate some things like adding on local taxes.

The financial side of your one-to-one English teaching business

This part of setting up as your own boss may not be very glamorous, but it’s very essential work that you need to put in before you make the leap into being your own boss. Getting this done well in advance can save you a lot of headaches later.

I strongly advise that you get a separate bank account for your business. This will make accounting much easier and will help you to keep your business income and outgoings separate from your personal finances.

Meeting your tax responsibilities as a one-to-one English teacher
You will need to decide whether you want to be a ‘sole trader’ or a company. The laws, names and descriptions around these may vary from country to country, but generally, sole traders are individuals who work alone and for themselves, whereas a company can have directors, shareholders and employees.

You’re probably thinking that the obvious choice would be sole trader, but you can be a company of one person too. There can be tax advantages to this, depending on how much you are earning, and being a company can make it easier to get an unsecured business loan to grow your business. As a company, students tend to take you more seriously. It might seem early days but it’s worth looking into if you plan at any stage to grow your business and maybe employ other teachers.

Looking after your professional development

Being your own boss and teaching English one-to-one can be a bit solitary. You may well miss the social and developmental contact you get from being part of a staff room of English teachers.

You can compensate for this by creating your own personal learning network (PLN) by joining various social media groups and platforms and make sure you follow people who provide meaningful tips and suggestions on how to improve your teaching. It’s also worth trying to get in touch with other one-to-one English teachers, both locally and internationally. Many will have been through the same experiences that you are going through, they may be able to offer good advice, and they may well be able to share students with you if they have some that they can’t take on. Be sure to look for ways you can cooperate rather than compete.

n addition to this, you can always consider developing your skills even further by enrolling in a teacher development course or subscribing to a platform for teachers such as Oxford TEFL Connect.

Ready to Start Teaching English as a Foreign Language? 

So, if you are passionate about teaching and being your own boss, teaching English one-to-one could be for you. So, why not get started by getting qualified?

Do you think you have what it takes to be a great English as a foreign language teacher? Why not apply and find out for yourself where the CELTA qualification can take you? 

If you would like to find out more, get in touch with us at [email protected], chat with us on WhatsApp +34 670017861, or apply now.