Baltic Council for International Education

Riga, Latvia October 2015

Our Assistant Director, Alan Etherton, attended “Days of International Education” in Riga, Latvia in support of the Baltic Council. The event was split over a number of days in three countries where you could interact with international students from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The event was in cooperation with the education consultancy agency Meridian Group. We were joined by many of our partner schools, proving that the event is largely popular.

This event happens twice a year and it was our pleasure to attend. International education providers, Etherton Education included, had the chance to meet one-on-one with parents and children, students, agencies and local education providers. The fair had been organised so we could meet specifically with prospectus students in the right age range who were looking for language courses. Many children and students were aged between 8-18 years of age which was perfect for our institution. There were around 10,000 visitors across three countries which made a busy and inviting atmosphere. There was a prosperous market for us to promote and target our potential students for the next coming summer.

There were various seminars and presentations over the course of the day from a range of people from different institutions; few were about IELTS examinations, aspirations and achievements from studying in the UK and what programmes are offered in Britain in general. All seminars had great turn outs and reflected well on the students who also attended, demonstrating how enthusiastic they were to find out more about education in the UK.

Throughout the event, we met many new agencies from countries we are yet to explore in great detail. The day in Riga gave us the opportunity to promote our new courses that we are providing in the summer of 2016. We received fantastic feedback about our new range of courses, running across Pre-A-Level, Pre-GCSE and Junior Academic, so we hope we can begin to encourage a strong flow of students from these European countries. All of the students seemed eager and keen to study within the UK which allowed strong relationships to be built.

We thought the overall event was brilliantly organised and opened up many doors for us.