Management policies and practices in Iran's EFL schools: A nationwide report on the private school sector

Hamid Gholami and Niloufar Farhadvand
Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran

Thousands of private autonomous institutes serve millions of learners in Iran, yet their managerial practices remain largely unexamined. Our study of management policies and practices in the English language teaching (ELT) setting of Iranian private language schools explored the qualifications, teacher recruitment and training, classroom observation process, instructional materials selection, assessment strategies and pedagogical knowledge of managers. To gather data, semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with 107 managers across 27 Iranian provinces. Data were analysed using content analysis with systematic coding procedures, revealing substantial variation across all management domains. Only 36.4% of managers held Teaching English as a Foreign/ Second (TEFL/TESL) qualifications, and 18.7% reported no prior teaching experience. Recruitment practices ranged from comprehensive, multi-stage processes (21.5%) to reliance solely on oral interviews (24.3%). While 57.9% of institutions provided teacher training, 42.1% did not. Classroom observation was widespread (82.2%), though 42.1% used closed-circuit television (CCTV) monitoring. Most critically, despite 100% of managers claiming familiarity with contemporary teaching methods, only 10.3% could provide acceptable scientific explanations about them, and 90.7% were unfamiliar with common instructional frameworks. The substantial gap between managers' self-reported and demonstrated pedagogical knowledge and the diverse orthodoxies in the schools' management suggest that targeted professional development could meaningfully enhance management capacity and, consequently, educational quality across this influential sector.
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Authors: Dr Hamid Gholami is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages Teaching, Ker.C., Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran. Holding a PhD in applied linguistics, his current research is focused on teacher education. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7938-4112 Email: hamidgholami@iau.ac.ir Ms Niloufar Farhadvand holds a masters degree from the Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran. She works as an English language teacher, and her research interests include education and language teaching. Email: niloufar88f@gmail.com Please cite as: Gholami, H. & Farhadvand, N. (2026). Management policies and practices in Iran's EFL schools: A nationwide report on the private school sector. Issues in Educational Research, 36(2), 495-517. http://www.iier.org.au/iier36/gholami.pdf