Pros
- Compulsory (haphazardly administered) PD for FT staff means you'll eventually get some useful tips. - Pay is usually on time. - If you get the right Centre, and are prepared to sacrifice your time/energy, you will become a great teacher. - Some incredible, long-suffering teachers - Apollo has some of the most amazing students I have ever met. - You'll usually get 2 consecutive off days every week. But you'll probably have to do admin, marking or even cover classes on them.
Cons
- You will always owe hours at the end of your contract, even when you've worked 10+ hours overtime most months of the year. - You will never work hard enough for Apollo, yet you'll go no more recognition than the teachers phoning it in. - You're continually threatened with not getting your bonus... which is worth less than all of the unpaid work you must do, the unpaid meetings and training you must attend to get it. - Nearly any other company pays better, has less work, and is just better and easier to work for. This hurts when it's one of the most expensive centres for the students, but with the lowest paid teachers with the highest expectations on them. - Enjoy off days when you can get them. - Always aping the competition and dressing it up as being 'innovative', but no real consideration for the implications or why that company is doing it. - TAs and other local staff are treated appallingly by the company. - HRs job is to obfuscate, not help. - Limited opportunities or benefits from staying more than one year. You're more likely to get a Senior Teaching role because you're friends with the LXM than due to merit. The nepotism policy is ignored completely. - Policies are made, but rarely followed, unless they want to use it to penalise staff. - You will on occasion have to buy your own printing paper because there's none due to be delivered for a week or so, but there's no mechanism for someone to walk down to the stationary shop down the road with some petty cash and get paper even though it's Saturday afternoon and the centre has run out. - Tax after your first year! Good luck with that waking nightmare. - No accountability or self-awareness by management. - Teacher turnover is accepted as unavoidable, but endless resources for trying to get parents to re-sign. - Local staff not trained in Safe Guarding, so have no idea how to manage issues of abuse presented by students, even though foreign teachers must abide by the policies/training which leads to dead ends. - I have never been so disappointed with people as having to deal with the lows the sales staff will stoop to because they're paid so little and there is so much pressure to sell, rather than care for the wellbeing and needs of the students. - When teacher privacy is breached due to rolling out technology the HR staff don't know how to use, the response is to brush is under the carpet. - Forcing teachers to implement ridiculous holiday themed or competition-based lessons into the course, which means having the reduce the already scant time spent with the students to fulfil the requirements of the over-packed curriculum, to get them to write a letter to Santa or create an entry for a competition most don't want to enter. - The student tracking system is a nightmare that will haunt you the entire time you are there. It is immoveable and a hinderance to supporting students. There's no flexibility, which makes the above point worse. - The disconnect between what is in the curriculum, what is in the books, what is in the test and what is expected to be achieved is baffling.