Job Discussion Forums

[ATeacher]

Hi everyone,

Only my third post here, but often been very impressed with the knowledge of some regarding EFL.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw a short list of schools at you that I am considering applying to for summer teaching (yes, I know summer schools ), and perhaps those of you that know good or bad things about them could let me know. It would be greatly appreciated.

I have looked thoroughly through the forum just to check they haven't been discussed before....

So here is the list:

EJO
Stafford House
ISIS
EAC World
Emabssy CES
Discovery Summer

Anything would be extremely useful. Many thanks in advance!

[ATeacher]

I have just realise I missed some pages on this forum. Now I can see Embassy (excuse the spelling before ) has been discussed before. There were a couple of comments on Stafford House and ISIS, but anything else on those would be great.

I looked at the TEFL blacklist, none of them are there. A few have talked about other good and bad schools, but not given them names. I wonder if they are any those here.....

Thank you in advance!

[SueH]

I worked for EJO for a couple of years. My first year was (as an unemployed but experienced career changer) after I'd done a 20 hour taster course in TEFL at the local FE college. Finished the last evening of 10 on the Wednesday, saw a job ad in the local rag on Thursday; emails, phone-calls, sorting references on Friday and started on Monday!

The money was nothing to talk about, and nor were the materials available, but I coped with 6 weeks of French teenagers! One advantage of the school I did was that the French groups were all accompanied by 'animateurs', which meant that there wasn't the need as with some schools to spend 24/24 hours keeping the kids under control. I spent time with the kids, but as it wasn't obligatory it could be kept on a very relaxed and positive basis.

That's not to say all EJO groups/centres operate on this basis, but I think all that are French colonie de vacances' probably are.

[been_there]

I'm going to have to warn you off ISIS:

They are a travel agency that has branched out into English summer camps to make money. The camps are poorly organized, on a shoestring budget and no one really cares about anything but the bottom line.

Try one of the others.

Just my 2 cents.

[lolwhites]

In another thread, I linked to an article from EL Gazette which states that Embassy CES and Stafford House are being investigated by the Minimum Wage Unit. Here's the link again:
http://www.elgazette.com/index.cfm?action=2&more=1&id=83

been_there: Thanks for having an avatar that doesn't take up half the page!

[malu]

Without mentioning any company names in particular I'd also caution against taking a 'two week' or 'four week' contract with some summer schools without first checking just how many days this involves working for them.

Twenty-eight days can so very easily become 29 or 30 days in reality - small potatoes if you are earning loads but extremely irritating if you're not.

[Santiago Matamoros]

I worked for EAC for 4 years in a row. Their working conditions had been steadily improving until this year. Try to avoid Scotland or Northern Ireland if you want your contract to be honoured. The best places to work are in the Southeast of England. In fairness to them they are pretty honest.

[Chris_Crossley]

I have worked for two separate companies during two separate summers eight years apart.

In the summer of '01, I worked for Anglo-European Study Tours, which, at that time, offered only non-residential positions and the pay was so low that I barely had anything left in my pocket after four weeks of working at Reading and Watford (two weeks at each site), given the fact that I had to pay for expensive university-based accommodation (especially at Watford).

Notwithstanding the fact that the company appears now to offer residential posts, the pay was barely any better in '09 than it was in '01 (having checked out the ads on TEFL.com).

However, in '09, I worked for Embassy CES, which levied a moderate �30 per week accommodation charge, provided that one lived on the premises. I spent two weeks on the site of an independent-sector boarding school in a semi-rural town in Wiltshire, while I spent a third week on a university campus in south-west London; the room in the latter was bigger and better - it had an en-suite shower and WC, for a start!

The pay at Embassy wasn't too bad, but it wasn't brilliant by any means. Even so, as someone with 8 years' worth of full-time TEFL experience in China by now, I had no complaints and I just might consider working for Embassy again in a future year, though I would probably want to work at other sites in a kind of "peripatetic" fashion (so to speak): boarding schools seem to provide a nice kind of environment to spend summer holidays in, even if one is meant to be working!

[PattyFlipper]

[Chris_Crossley]

[PattyFlipper]

[Chris_Crossley]