Best qualification to help EAL students?

[HoollyWugger]

Due to an increasing number of EAL students, and the feeling that we are woefully unprepared to help them, I was looking at various courses today - TEFL, and other similar ones.

Does anyone know if they're any good, or is there something more useful?

The generic tefl certificate isnt worth the paper it's written on, you would need to look at the Trinity Tesol or Cambridge Cert. Both of these however are adult based though there are additional courses for Young Learners- think Cambridge offer a Primary and a Secondary focused course(...also look at the courses International House and Bell offer. It's been a while since I did my young learner course and things change.
There are a lot of Esol jobs around, for adults in the UK who don't have English as a first language. For these the Trinity or CELTA would be needed and ideally a further teaching qualification.