Fundraising

SOL has been working over 33 years to support the teaching for English in Eastern Central Europe where, for many years during communist times, English was not taught in most schools, whilst Russian was, though not necessarily learnt.

The fall of communism resulted in Russian no longer being taught in most schools, but the sudden demand for English was like a tsunami. Yet there were few people there to teach it.

SOL started in 1991 in response to this demand and whilst we have welcomed almost 60,000 students to our centres in North Devon, plus their teachers, we have continued to try to offer support within their own countries, especially to teachers. Their incomes still fall well short of what teachers in the western part of Europe earn.  

For 20 years we recruited native speaker teachers to work in State schools in the region for a year at a time, some 700 in total. This gave the opportunity for communication daily in English for thousands of both students and teachers.

Every year we have offered some 30 free teacher training courses to teachers through their professional conferences, either in England or closer to their home. These courses involve many teachers from different countries. This building of understanding and sharing of experiences between countries is also very important to us!

Covid-19 destroyed the reserves that we had built up over the preceding years, which were planned to be used to provide more of this type of support for teachers of English.

Now, recovering from the pandemic, we are planning to provide this support and more once again. We will continue to offer free places on our teacher training courses held each summer at the various national conferences. We are also developing other ways of support, such as below, and are happy to hear any suggestions and requests.

From 2025, we are going to subsidise immersion language courses in the teachers’ own schools in EC Europe which are run by English in Action, who have more than 20 years’ experience in this. Their prices can be too high for the more economically constrained countries in the eastern half of Europe, and we hope our help will lower this barrier.  

Any donations from people who wishes to support our mission work is very welcome to offer their support in the form of a donation via our website link at the top of our home page. Being a charity, any donation from a UK citizen can be gift aided.

It will help us to reach beyond those that can afford to come to England, and especially where access to English is more difficult or the financial barriers are too great. 

Thank you to all for your continued support.

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