Unfortunately this institution is not to trust anymore
Unfortunately this institution, or whatever they claim to be, is now behaving like one more of those giant ghost online companies that simply goes after your money, in this case under the guise of accrediting your yoga courses. I have tried to reason with them and explain I am not a big Yoga Studio or yoga online company. I am a small provider of Teacher Training in a low population area of the UK. They seem oblivious to hear reason and seem to be totally blinded by positional power and a sense of some sort of superiority that allows them to force you to take part in their new online system, whether it is appropriate for you as a Teacher Trainer or not. They have new rigid rules that started after Covid which are only useful for those that run big studios in big cities or are linked to them. It may also work for those that want or teach online courses, perhaps. I have an aye condition that doesn't allow me to teach online since it is damaging to my eyes to spend a lot of time in front of a screen. I have explained that I do not wish to, and nor can I deliver online courses, but they insist this is the way now. I have asked for a refund of my yearly Trainer fee that was taken from my account at the end of August. They took £490 which is the yearly fee for each Further Training course. They took this without telling me in advance, assuming I would run a training this year. No one asked me or called me to ask. Maybe they sent a general email that I didn't read amongst the dozens of emails they send to try and keep you engaged with their website. I didn't know that they had my bank details from the previous year, so I didn't notice until later. I hesitated, but I decided to try and offer another FTC course but I didn't have enough interest. I sent a polite request to YAP with the due information explaining that I will not teach any FTC courses this year or in the near future but they refuse to refund me. Their answer is rigid and disingenuous. Just empty politeness that means absolutely nothing to me because it ignores my situation completely. When I enrolled with yoga Alliance many years ago I felt supported as a small provider, but now I feel the opposite. My suggestion to them is that they should only charge you per course that you actually deliver, rather than this yearly subscription system that only favours large providers. It is not sustainable for the yoga community on the long run since it seems more concerned with maintaining a "one size fits all" approach which doesn't reflect the reality of most yoga teachers nowadays. The "yoga market" is absolutely saturated with online courses and classes and many local teachers struggle to keep their classes going because of this. Some of them are forced to teach in gyms and such like in order to pay the bills. How would these teachers be able to afford a high quality standard Further Teacher training? They just can't pay for it, so this system that they are imposing is not sustainable.
October 13, 2023
Unprompted review