After you contact us, we get the ball rolling straight away with a stealth visit to your site. We determine if you meet our initial accreditation standards, then we message you to provide feedback. If we determine that you are within our scope for TEFL accreditation, we process you through our provider certification route (a free service also available for online TEFL course providers not yet ready to commit to course accreditation), take half payment for our accreditation service, and begin the process as soon as we receive access to your course materials. This is undertaken via one of two routes (both require a signature from ITEFLOCA that all course documentation remains sole property of the TEFL course provider and no copying or dispersal of materials will take place): ideally, all material is emailed to us in unit files, but an alternative is to allow open access to our accreditors through an unlocked student account, which would allow us to view test modes without having to complete them in their entirety.

The course provider’s materials and course structure are then cross-checked in accordance with ITEFLOCA’s standards to determine the status of the course(s) accordingly. We use a simple ‘Meets’, ‘Almost’, and ‘Not yet’ determination for all components of TEFL courses, ranging from individual areas such as ‘Grammar is perfect to near-perfect’ to ‘Assessments effectively measure skills and knowledge taught’. We allow company’s to gain ‘provisional accreditation’ if they have three or less ‘Almost’ scores out of our range of standards, though the company must actively work towards developing these areas toward ‘Meets’ before the membership renewal, and must prove how they have met one or more of those standards by that point (or their accreditation may be temporarily suspended until such proof is provided). Accreditation is granted when both a course has three or less ‘Almost’ scores and the provider pays the second half of the accreditation fee. The first year’s membership fee is included in the accreditation fee. Upon receiving the second part of the fee, the TEFL course online provider will receive the full membership starter pack, which includes logos, membership number and details, a digital certificate, login access, a membership page that they can choose to display or not, and further documentation (pertaining to both provider accreditation and separate course accreditation).