Methodology

What is listed

Verified organisations that sell structured language instruction: independent language schools, established school groups, university language centres with publicly bookable courses, business-language specialists, junior-programme providers and schools with live online courses. A school with several campuses has one profile and a separate record for each campus, because address, courses, prices and accommodation differ by campus.

Not listed: individual tutor marketplaces, generic learning apps, translation agencies, ordinary schools that teach languages only inside compulsory schooling, university degrees with no stand-alone language course, travel businesses without their own verified language programme, teacher-training courses, and anything we could not verify on the provider’s own site. Online-only instruction is never given an invented location: it appears as an online offering.

The first research wave covers English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and Turkish, in the destinations shown on the destinations page. These are research priorities, not limits, and coverage is not exhaustive. All languages and countries are held to the same standard.

Where facts come from

Facts are read from the school’s own site (course pages, price lists and fee PDFs, accommodation pages, cancellation and refund policies), and from official registers, government pages and accreditor or association records. Directories, rankings and review sites may help us find schools but are never the source of a fact, and we do not copy any directory.

For every fact we keep the page it came from, a verbatim quote and the date it was read. A script later fetches each page again and checks that the quote is still there. A fee whose quote can no longer be found is withheld; a campus or course whose own source can no longer be found is taken off the site until an editor re-checks it. Pages we cannot read automatically (for example PDFs) are marked as not machine-checked rather than assumed correct.

Unknown is not “no”

If a school does not publish something, or we could not read it, the page says Not confirmed. We never read “not published” as “not offered”, and we never fill gaps with estimates or the practice of similar schools. When you filter on age, duration, level, start month, teaching hours or price, courses with a missing value stay in the results and are flagged instead of silently disappearing. We publish no star ratings, student reviews, pass rates or exam results.

Languages and places are kept apart

We record separately: the language taught, the location of the campus, the language of the school’s website, the languages its staff work in, and (where stated) the language used to explain lessons. Choosing Turkish does not move you to a Turkish interface; the site stays in English.

Courses, lessons and hours

Delivery (in person, live online, hybrid, self-paced), intensity, duration, audience, level and schedule are independent fields. “20 lessons a week” is not “20 hours”: teaching hours are shown only when the school states hours, or by multiplying published lessons per week by the published lesson length, and the page says which. We do not invent equivalences between a school’s levels and CEFR or exam levels. Exam preparation is separate from examination administration: a preparation course does not make a school an authorised test centre.

Prices

Each price row keeps the amount, currency, billing basis (per week, per lesson, per course...), the year and dates it applies to, the week range of the tier, whether it is compulsory, and what it includes. We never convert currencies. A course total is calculated only when the published basis supports it: a single weekly tier that covers your number of weeks, or a published per-course price, plus compulsory one-off or weekly charges in the same currency and year. Otherwise the components are listed and no total is shown. Weekly tuition is never treated as equivalent to semester tuition. Prices past their stated validity are flagged “Check current price”.

Accommodation is priced separately and is never described as included in tuition unless the school says so. For junior programmes we show supervision arrangements only as the provider publishes them; that is not a safety guarantee.

Accreditation, membership and status

Accreditation, government registration, association membership and exam-centre status are shown as different things, each with its scope. Membership is never presented as accreditation. “Confirmed on the authority or association record” needs a register or document that lists the school; otherwise a claim is labelled “Stated by the school”. Four listing statuses stay distinct and are never merged into one badge: Research checked (our own review), School claimed, School-submitted information and Sponsored.

Best language schools pages

Our Best language schools pages, when published, are unranked shortlists with stated criteria, sources, limitations and a review date. “Best” depends on the student, so we do not number or score schools or claim any school is objectively best. Neither sponsorship nor school submissions can add a school or move it.

Indexing and thin pages

A destination, language-and-country or course-type page exists only where there are published records, and is submitted to search engines only with enough verified coverage. Search results, filters and comparisons are never indexed. Pages that are reachable but thin carry a no-index tag.

Corrections

Every profile has a report a correction link. School-submitted updates go to review before anything changes; a verified claim does not edit the research record directly.