How much can you earn Teaching English to Children?

There are different career paths to teach English to children and they come with different commitments and rewards, so let’s look at them, i.e. how much can a teacher earn by Teaching English to Children?

We will here focus on two specific scenarios:

1. working as an independent teacher
2. opening a language school

Examples will be specific to Italy, though many aspects will be similar in other countries too.

If you love children and the English language, you might consider starting your own English courses for children. Maybe you see this as a side project, something you’d like to do just for a couple of hours per week. Or maybe you’d like to dedicate yourself to this profession.

The appeal is understandable: flexible working hours, the ability to align your teaching with your own values and methods, and the chance to make a meaningful impact on young learners.

But enthusiasm doesn’t pay the bills, so let’s look at the practical questions:

How much does it cost to get started?
How many students do I need to make it worthwhile?
Is it really sustainable?

There is no unique answers. It depends on many factors. Let’s take a look at them.

Or click here if you’d like to know how we can help you and assist you, we have multiple options catering to different needs

with Learn with Mummy

1. Teaching English to Children: Individual lessons vs Playgroups

Whether to give individual or group lesson, is a choice often dictated by convenience.

A family contacts you, you offer them the lesson they asked for. Maybe they’ll come to your place, but most likely they’ll ask you to go to theirs. It’s annoying, but at least you don’t have to tidy up or pay rent, right?

Let’s see…

Individual vs group lessons: children’s point of view

Individual lessons are supposed to be golden standard of teaching as they come with undivided attention to the learner, personalized pace and materials, lot’s of speaking time.

All of the above might be true when working with a committed and dedicated learner who wants to learn, must learn, and is going to do everything they can in order to learn.

That is not the case for children. Children’s learning primarily stems from the engaging nature of the learning experience rather than from an explicit, conscious desire to learn. The opportunity to play with other children is key in creating such engagement and desire to participate week after week.

Individual vs group lessons: teachers’ point of view

There is no denying that running group sessions allows the teacher to be more fairly rewarded for her time and effort. Even if group sessions come with extra costs, as we will see later, they are vastly compensated by regularity, predictability (no last minute cancellations) and overall margins (revenues minus costs).

2. Teaching English to Children: Your Location or Flexible Locations?

One of the first decisions you’ll face is whether to open a permanent location or rent space by the hour.

Opening a dedicated school requires:

• A long-term lease
• Renovation and setup costs
• Furniture and equipment
• Ongoing utilities, cleaning and maintenance expenses.

Considering that you’ll need a rather large room (assuming you want to adopt a play based approach), bare minimum furnishing, a toilet, safety measures, utilities, and maintenance costs, you can expect yearly costs ranging from €9,000 to €25,000 or more, plus setup costs from €1,000 (if you find the perfect place and just need to fix few things), to amounts we don’t even want to think about.

Renting space by the hour

This model is effective for independent teachers who:

• Work alone
• Teach in the afternoon or on weekends
• Prefer keeping overhead low and flexibility high

Such rooms typically cost from €15 to €25 per hour.

Note: If you think we forgot to mention the obvious option, teaching at home, we haven’t.

Teaching at home is an option we do not recommend for a number of reasons. Let us just mention 2:
1. By presenting your work professionally and teaching in dedicated premises you can command higher prices (that would far out-weight the added costs)
2. From a pedagogical point of view, language teaching is more effective when it happens in a group setting (as mentioned above) and in a location which is neither the teacher’s nor the child’s home (obviously we are here talking about weekly sessions with a teacher, bilingual families are a completely different story)

3. Teaching English to Children: solo Teacher or School?

Solo teacher

If you work on your own your capacity is of course limited by your own availability. Everything is very easy and straight forward. You can opt for fiscal regimes for small business (in Italy: Forfettario, total yearly earnings below 85,000 euros).

If you’d like to receive qualifications, you have few options, and they are pricey. CELTA for instance costs between 1500 and 2000 euros and is targeted to teaching adults, you can do CELTA YL (Young Learners) as an add on, at extra cost, but it offers only training for 5–10 yo, or 8–13 yo or 11–16 yo.

Opening a School

If you run a language school, hire employees or collaborate with free lance teachers, you can of course offer many more courses, however you should factor in the added complexity:

1. Location: you’ll need either a bigger location with multiple rooms or to rent more locations per hour. When working with children the eligible time slots are fairly limited (outside of school hours, before dinner) and teachers will probably have to work in parallel
2. Recruiting: finding the right teachers is not easy, the suitable candidates are limited and their availability, or price, might not meet your constraints
3. Selection: schools often require teachers to be native speakers and/or to have certifications like CELTA, neither guarantees that a person knows how to teach children, specifically young children, below 6, for which there are no certifications
4. Training: this is a big issue. Schools seldom invest much time and effort in training their language teachers, because they know that turnover is high. We believe that there’s no quality in teaching without training and support, but do what you think is right.
5. Hiring: if the teachers are free lance and have their own business (partita IVA) they will issue an invoice, if they are employees you will have to hire them and factor in also the cost of “consulente del lavoro”.

If you have employees you cannot opt for fiscal regimes for small business, Forfettario (but check with your accountant).

4. Teaching English to Children: Revenues Potential

Let’s say you teach directly (without hiring other teachers), and each child pays an annual fee of €450 – 550 for a school-year course.

If you offer group classes (6–10 children) and work 2–3 afternoons per week plus Saturday mornings, it’s realistic to serve:

• 7–9 groups a week,
• 6–10 children per group,
• Resulting in about 45–80sh students annually.

Estimated annual gross revenues from €20,000 to €45,000.

This would entail minimal fixed costs (renting only when teaching), and allow for a healthy margin and an excellent work life balance.

Teachers who scale above 80 children see annual revenues above €45,000, while still maintaining control over their schedule and work life balance, and having the summer off to travel.

5. Teaching English to Children: Costs you’ll have to face

When working independently and renting by the hour, your main costs include:

• Location: as we have seen above, this cost is far more important if you open your own school
• Teaching materials: this is mostly a time cost, as it is demanding to develop a teaching methodology and techniques and to adapt them to different groups and scenarios
• Marketing and promotion: €500–€1,000/year
• Insurance and accountant: Variable
• Taxes: Depends on personal circumstances. If this is a very small project, and you earn less than 5k per year, you don’t even have to pay taxes, which means that you could go for an easy start before deciding whether to scale up. Also, as mentioned above, in Italy there is a simplified VAT regime (Forfettario) which is open to anyone and imposes a 15% tax on 78% of earnings.
  Please consult a certified accountant for details and estimates.

This means that a teacher working independently, only for few hours per week, can easily create an income that she and her family can depend on.

Teachers who have more time available can of course increase volumes, and/or teach in schools in the mornings.

We assume that summers will be free. Though you can of course offer summer activities.

Note n.1: The Hidden Costs of Doing It Alone

Working on your own with total independence can be appealing, but it also comes with specific challenges:

• Designing your own curriculum (requiring months of work at best, paralising doubts at worst)
• Creating professional materials for each age group
• Building a brand from scratch
• Marketing your offer
• Having none to go to when problems arise (as they inevitably do, as in any job)
• Having the ultimate responsibility over pricing might put you in unpleasant “bargaining” situations or induce you to underpricing your offer

Many teachers don’t even get started on their own, as they don’t know how to go past the first couple of spontaneous clients. Others hold it together for a couple of years of “do-it-yourself,” then begin to feel stretched thin. Not having anyone to go to, they lose confidence, motivation and ideas and abandon the project.

Note n.2: The Hidden Benefits of a Partnership

If you look at teaching as a profession, want to deliver outstanding quality and at the same time safeguard your sanity, it would be best to partner up. And that’s exactly what we offer at Learn with Mummy.

We believe in each teacher being her own master and making a firm commitment to the families they work with, but being also part of a team. Each of us offers and receives support as needed.

If you are considering a partnership with Learn with Mummy, you’ll find that it can solve most of the solo teacher’s problems. Instead of reinventing the wheel, you gain:

• A proven method developed specifically for children,
• Complete lesson plans and materials,
• Support with marketing, communication, and family engagement,
• An established brand trusted by parents,
• Ongoing training from the brand as well as
• Peer to peer support, within a team of teachers

And importantly: you can still teach independently, rent spaces as needed, and keep full control of your calendar, without the pressure of managing a full school or employees.

Learn with Mummy has been active for over 15 years, with teachers working across Italy — some of whom have been with us for more than a decade. Many teach part-time with 40–90 students per year and earn a higher net income than teachers who open a physical school on their own or who work for a language school.

Why? Because they skip the setup and admin, and focus on growing what truly matters: quality teaching and word-of-mouth trust.

If you’re curious about the opportunity to collaborate with us, and would like to see if it fits your goals, feel free to get in touch: no commitment, just a conversation.

To sum it up

We started this post with three questions, let’s answer them:

How much does it cost to get started?
Quite a few thousand Euros if you open your own location, a lot of time if you do everything yourself, very little if you partner up.

How many students do I need to make it worthwhile?
With 1 or 2 groups you can have a small project that doesn’t even need to be registered as a business and still earns you a small income. From 25 children onwards it becomes a professional project. With 2 afternoons per week you could manage 50 to 60 children.

Is it really sustainable?
Yes, at Learn with Mummy we have been doing English Playgroups for children for 15 years all across Italy. With teachers staying even more than 10 years and working both in towns and in small towns or villages.

Get in touch

Fill the form below and let us know about your questions and needs.

Are you looking to teach just a couple of hours per week, as a side project, or a few hours per week?

In which areas are you interested in working?

How do you feel about working with children and parents? Scared, curious, enthusiastic?

Fill in the form, we’ll get back to you and offer you an appointment to talk about it: