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Sashadroogie · Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2010 12:27 pm Post subject: McSchools - what's the future?

Is there anybody out there with any information on what exactly the big schools are planning to do longer term to deal with the visa issues? At present, foreign teachers seem to be left bearing the burden of nearly all the visa-trip costs, though there seems to be some variation on this. Other teachers have just skipped out, unsurprisingly.

There is talk of the McSchools switching to recruiting mainly Russian teachers as a fix to the legal/visa issues and costs. Anyone else heard this? Quite plausible, and not without precedent: remember the British Council and the problems of foreign Cambridge examiners? Resulted in Russian-only Cambridge examiners for a spell. Could something similar happen again in the language schools themselves?

yakov1 · Joined: 12 Mar 2010 Posts: 26

There is no problem with the Mcschools...it is only a problem with BKC because they failed to get the correct documents in order when the warnings came out. Language Link Volgograd(where i work) was the first LL school to get itself together and many of the other LL were reluctant to follow suit, but head office decided everyone should do it and so last year they did. Thus we have no problems at all.

Furthermore the law has been repealed already and January 1st 2011 all work permit applications will go through FMS rather than the local oblast.

So it is a problem only for this current year for those schools who didn't nominate their teachers last year(since it works a calendar year in advance).

storm in a teacup really.

jpvanderwerf2001 · Joined: 02 Oct 2003 Posts: 1117 Location: New York

I'm not so sure, Yakov. As I understand it, EF is having some issues with visas as well.
Perhaps LL is the anomaly?

yakov1 · Joined: 12 Mar 2010 Posts: 26

i am not aware of any trouble with EF but it is certainly possible...simply schools had to go to their local oblast to apply for registration individually to employ foreigners(and nominate which countries those foreigners could be from) around May last year....those that didn't got caught out. The main school can't do it, the individual schools had to do. as i said many LL schools were reluctant to do it but were eventually forced to and lucky for them!