ACLID (Castilla y León Association of Language Schools) is a regional association, based in Castilla y León, of schools whose main activity is language teaching; its philosophy is to defend the sector from unfair competition and improve the quality of teaching for our clients, and keep our members informed about everything concerning our sector.
The Association drew up its statues in 1984, and has been working for the sector for more than 30 years.
Members of ACLID are also full members, with voting rights, of FECEI, (Spanish Federation of Centres for Language Teaching) and members of ACADE (Association of Independent Centres of Private Teaching); both these organisations are influential employers’ associations.
Our association, with members in most of the Castilla y León provincial capitals, and various other cities, currently has thirteen members, who run sixteen language centres.
Some centres are very small, with just a couple of teachers, but other schools have more than 30 teachers working there. In total there are around 150 teachers working at ACLID member schools, about 50 administrative staff, and over 6500 students receiving classes per annumbe they of English, French, Spanish, German, or other languages. We are the most representative association in the region and in turn we belong to the most representative national federation [FECEI], the reference federation for the sector.
Bothe ACLID and FECEI’s ambition is to continue growing and to offer the advantages of membership to even more language schools in the sector, bearing in mind especially the spectacular growth which the sector has undergone in recent years. It is clear that there are many new schools which will need the information, back-up and training and guidelines that our association can offer them.
Our Federation supports the organisation of two annual conventions, which run in conjunction with training days for directorial staff and teachers. The federation itself organises one of these training days, and the other training day is organised by a regional association. In Autumn 2017 ACLID intends to be the host for this convention, and then to continue to organise its own annual training day every year.
There is a FECEI representative at the negotiating table for the collective agreement which governs working conditions in our sector, and being a member of FECEI means having access to all the information about these negotiations and even the chance to express an influential opinion on how we wish the negotiations to proceed.
We publish and send our members information about our obligations as businesses, compulsory accident insurance policies, health and safety legislation and etc..
On the same day as our annual AGM, we always offer our members information sessions, which have lately been about new legislation, improvements in management practices, new technologies, or webpage design.
The ACLID delegate on the board of FECEI attends this committee’s meetings and sends all the information received there on to members. Members have the right to attend FECEI’s General Meetings, but if they are unable to attend, they may delegate votes on issues of major interest to the delegate, who will vote in their name.
As well as teaching language classes, which in many cases lead to interntional qualifications, such as the Cambridge, Trinity, TOEFL and TOEIC exams, there are schools which provide teacher training, or teach translation, by way of example. Among the directors and teachers at our schools there is a valuable resource of people “training the trainers”, and their services are often called upon by our universities and by the Regional Governments Teacher Professional Development Centres, by EDUCACYL, and the Official State Language Schools for their training activities; at a national level, we also collaborate with FECEI, with TESOL, and even internationally at conventions such as IATEFL.