There's a couple of interesting coments in the "nominate a school for blacklisting section" reprinted here. Anyone like to add to any comments? The Inspector is always a tad bilious when faced with a plate of chop suey and has yet to venture to Hong Kong. Rumour has it that they have an invountary organ donor scheme in place for those that transgress and therefore as one of life's great transgressors I prefer to hang on to my bodily parts and have so far kept well clear of the place.
Comment 1.
CHILDREN'S ENGLISH CENTRE HONG KONG - stay well clear of this place. The director of the school Clare doesn't even have a degree or qualification in education. She has a severe attitude problem and thinks far too highly of herself, when in actual fact she is quite an offensive human being. Classing her as human is controversial! Her muppet skivvy Charlie is equally as vile and basically they manage to upset and annoy all who work there. There annual turnover of staff speaks for itself! You did get paid on time, but by check because BACS cost an extra £1 a month to process, that is how tight they are! Honestly i would advise against going to work for them completely. There are some great schools in Hong Kong, so do your research first. Hong Kong is a brilliant place to live and work and I would definitely recommend it, just not with these farmyard animals.
Comment 2,
Children's English Centre. Whoever wrote the previous comment on CEC were absolutely correct and even slightly kind I'd say. I worked for them and they had a 100% turn over of staff. Some of us took less pay just so that we wouldn't have to look at those two anymore. There were numerous complaints about them on Daves ESL cafe website but they were removed. They are the worst employers I've ever had. Charlie the 'muppet skivvy' was so smarmy and utterly two faced. Claire on the other hand was absolute poison and you'd feel on edge opening your mouth in their crappy little office. They made me cry a few times! I'm glad I had the experience because I'll never let that happen to me again but it took me a good year to stop feeling angry at them. Pure and utter poison. Don't even go there on the apartments for teachers, nearer China than Hong Kong island. Just don't bother with them.
Inspector McHammered of the Lard in Val Ferret, Switzerland
"I worked with IH affiliates (yes, they are affiliates not franchises) for 9 years. In total I was employed at 7 IH affiliates.
I came across a couple of good centres, a couple of mediocre ones and some utterly appalling ones.
The general feeling I got was that IH was in decline, moral and managerial decline. When I first started working at an IH affiliate there were structured points within the affiliation agreement which gave the teacher a fair deal. One such example was the minimum annual leave entitlement. However, with the now not so new director taking over (that's the affable Mr Carrier, of course), these points were either watered down or dropped all together. Thus you now have IH affiliates such as Kuala Lumpur offering only 18 days annual leave a year and making the teacher work 5 and a half days a week for a pathetic local salary which is laughed at even by local Malaysians.
The reasons for this were soon clear to anyone prepared to do the tiniest amount of research. Firstly, IH wants affiliation money. It is a business after all and a greedy one at that, so it has been encouraging expansion through taking on board centres with woefully poor and exploitative conditions. These centres were not keen on improving their conditions, especially when they had just started paying a rather sizeable affiliation fee (a huge fee for some economies), so the IH directorate gave the nod to allow them to establish whatever conditions and teaching contracts they liked.
Another important and often overlooked situation concerns the inner managerial decision makers. Who are they exactly? Well, we have the director of IH San Sebastian who just happens to preside over the most notorious IH affiliate in Spain with 6 day working weeks and low salaries for teachers living in one of the most expensive cities in Spain. Lovely chap though Mr Lcunza is, especially when he has just had dinner with his bank manager. Ah yes, there is also the director of IH Mexico City, the place where teachers are crying poverty. Yes, these and others like them are the people making all the affiliation decisions in the IH world.
So, from personal experience of certain IH centres I worked at what can I say? Of the good centres we can count in some of the affiliates in Southern Poland. These affiliates would be good places for the first time teacher to spend a year with. Their in-house training is very good indeed, although the salaries they offer, although adequate to live on, are below the market rate. So any teacher shouldn't bother with them for more than a year. Another very good IH affiliate I taught with for 2 years has now disaffiliated. It did this owing to the IH name losing credibility, the watering down of the agreement, and, more precisely because IH allowed the establishment of other new IH affiliates in the same city. These new affiliates were serious competition and offered both the teacher and the student a far inferior quality in terms of remuneration for the teacher and facilities for the student. This particular IH affiliate had worked very hard for years to build up the IH name to be well-recognised and highly thought of in its city. But with the arrival of the new affiliates the quality and reputation dropped rapidly and student numbers dropped owing to new competition and a reduced confidence, the only way forward was to disaffiliate and start again under its own name.
I won't mention the mediocre affiliates I worked at, but will merely mention the name of one which appears all over the net as being one of the worst schools in existence ( I mean anywhere, not just IH. It epitomises everything that is wrong with IH: International House Kuala Lumpur - just do a google search, and while you're at it, look out for a picture of the debonair Tan Sri Lim Kok Wing (Warning: do not do this while eating)
I could go on and give pages of details about my experience as a teacher and Director of Studies with the IH affiliates I have worked at, but I'd prefer to save them for the moment, in the belief that when I turn them into a bestseller, I'll recoup some of the cash that IH exploited me and countless others for.
So, Mr anonymous, with regards to your comments about IH, you are clearly posting some of the most nonsensical garbage I have ever seen, but I do thank you for providing an abundance of mirth and joviality to my day."