There is a growing number of businesses 'accrediting' yoga schools and teachers. Various Yoga Alliances and Yoga Australia and others. You do not need their approval to teach yoga or kids yoga legally.
As a school, Cosmic Kids has the option of seeking the approval of any number of these bodies. The process goes like this:
They ask to see our syllabus and check it tallies with their own view of what a good syllabus includes.
If it does, we are invited pay them an annual fee to 'approve' our training - which gives us various badges and the right to say we are accredited by them.
Finally our graduates are invited to pay an annual fee to them so they can say they were trained by a '{e.g. Yoga Alliance}-approved school'
Increasingly we hear from graduates who have done our online training and also an ‘accredited’ face-to-face training. They tell us that they wish they’d only done our training (at around a quarter of the cost of the face-to-face training). Our training may be online, but it is extremely thorough and inspiring. The quizzes and the evaluation process at the end are a solid test of good teaching and are taken extremely seriously by students and by Jaime.
Accordingly, we have decided that we won't pay self-styled bodies to approve our training. Here's why:
We want to take responsibility ourselves for the quality of what we’re doing. We don’t want to pay for quality benchmarking from someone we’ve never met. We do it ourselves, and in fact we tend to stay ahead of their standards. We take the best guidance available from the likes of Yoga Alliance (about curriculum in particular) but we build on it, adding in content they don't ask for because we believe it will help our students be brilliant teachers of kids yoga.
Fundamentally, the whole question of ‘can I teach yoga professionally?’ is not up to Yoga Australia, Yoga Alliance or even an insurer to decide. It’s up to you. Have you developed your technique and awareness to the extent that you believe you can teach safe and inspiring kids yoga? Do you believe that the training you’ve done makes you a good risk? To an insurer or indeed to the children you’re teaching.
It's worth saying there is increasing cynicism about Yoga Alliances in the yoga community. They are self-appointed bodies which make a living by charging teachers and schools to be accredited by them. They are popping up all over the place too - all competing for this very lucrative trade. If you live in Australia for example, you get to pick from Yoga Alliance Australia, Yoga Alliance International Australia, the Yoga Teacher's Association of Australia and Yoga Australia - as well as Fitness Australia!
Our advice to you: TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOURSELF! Scrutinise your training partner well and make sure that you're a safe and inspiring teacher. And for our part, we'll keep working hard to make our training safe, well-researched and relevant as well as inspiring!
For a nicely written piece about all this madness have a look here.
For what it's worth, our training does qualify as Continuing Education Hours under Yoga Alliance’s credentialing for paid up members of Yoga Alliance (US).