Saxoncourt
Programs and Reviews
About Saxoncourt Recruitment
Saxoncourt Recruitment was established in 1989 as a specialist English as a Foreign Language (EFL) recruitment agency.
Set up to provide teachers for Shane English Schools Japan, Saxoncourt has since grown to provide recruitment services to Shane English Schools (SES) in other countries (as SES has expanded) as well as acting as a recruitment consultancy for other schools throughout the world.
Since its foundation Saxoncourt has established a reputation for providing a friendly, professional service. Through Saxoncourt, teachers are able to find rewarding, secure jobs while employers can source reliable, good calibre, qualified teachers.
Saxoncourt Teacher Training department also offers various courses to prepare people for teaching EFL/ESL worldwide.
About Saxoncourt Teacher Training
Saxoncourt is a world leader in training, recruiting and placing English teachers. We place hundreds of teachers a year in various countries. Suitable candidates from CELTA and FELT will be offered jobs at the end of the course.
Whether you are looking for a teaching English as a foreign language course, such as a Cambridge
CELTA, or advice on starting a career teaching English abroad, or you are an experienced EFL/ESL teacher looking for something more challenging, the information you need can be found on this website.
Programs Abroad
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Reviews
10%Overall
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70%Overall
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Shane is one of 3 large chain schools in Taiwan. They have branches in virtually every neighborhood of the island. The idea is that kids of all ages come straight from school to their after school program, which means they usually open up within a block or two of each school. There are benefits to working for a large school, but you should know what you're getting into.
I remember that my boss once told me she was calling the head office to "Order a new teacher," sort of the way you might order a sweater from gap.com. This is really the mentality they have towards teachers in general. They bring in an enormous amount of foreigners each year, mostly who have no teaching experience, BA's in unrelated fields and marginal cultural sensitivities. They have developed a curriculum that any white faced monkey could teach. The students do learn and make progress, though not at a speed that I was comfortable with.
The job is not hard, once you get a feel for it. It will take more out of you than sitting in an office, but it's pretty fair to expect to start your work day after lunch and end only shortly after dinner. You'll be making less in your first year than the average salary, but remember that if you're taking this job, you probably have absolutely no teaching experience. If you do, you may be making a relatively comparable salary. You'll never make **big bucks** of other teaching jobs, but you'll be plenty comfortable and rarely stressed. The job leaves you with enough time and money to enjoy Taiwan, learn Chinese, get into trouble, make friends or do whatever you please.
Shane certainly has it's problems. Most of them go with the territory of a large operation. You should know what you're getting into before hand. Much to their credit, they spell out exactly what you'll be doing and how you'll be paid in the contract, no more no less. This puts them a big step above other schools. I taught there for one year and then moved on. It was probably the best year of my life. I learned an enormous amount, I had a great deal of fun and grew up a great deal. I often complained about Shane while I worked there, then I took a much higher paying job with an extremely disrespectful boss at a mismanaged school that never paid me what they promised.
Shane is what it is: it sets a low bar which it meets every time. I'm sure there are better schools out there, but I learned the hard way that there are also far worse.
80%Overall
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Overall, I would say that my experience at Shane was good. It was my first teaching position and my first time in Taiwan. For the most part, I would say that the school is a bit more professional than some of the other foreign owned English teaching schools and certainly more professional than the English schools set up by local proprietors.
Shane does provide an initial teaching orientation, which helps in gaining your footing if you've never taught before. The pay is slightly lower than other schools, but as others have stated that seems to be balanced out by being part of a responsive and organized school i.e., your concerns are generally addressed and the admin in the head office do try to help.
There were three aspects which I did not particularly like. The first is with respect to taking days off. While the Shane program does have an organized request based vacation system, this does not necessarily work in practice. For example, all of the English teachers tend to want the same days off - usually clustered around specific holidays of times of the year. I found that admin tended to have first choice to take off such days for themselves and then tried to accommodate everyone after. The second problem I had, and one which I do not have a solution for, is Shane's "on-call" system. Every few weeks each teacher is "on-call" on their day off and must be prepared to go in to substitute for any other English teacher who happens not to go into their job on that day. Needless to say, this can be a drawback and - in practice - takes away one of your days off fairly frequently. If you are working for the money, however, this may not be as much of a concern. Lastly, Shane has a dress code. For men they require a button down shirt and tie. Although this isn't a huge issue, Taiwan is a hot and humid place and there are those times when you look at your non-Shane colleagues with envy for not being drenched in sweat.
Overall, a solid program, especially for those new to teaching.
100%Overall
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We've all read horror stories of working for schools that treat you badly, don't pay you on time, don't know what they are doing, make excuses for everything. Well at Shane you don't need to worry about all that. They have western managers and all the systems are crystal clear and fair. If you can get a job with them you are onto a good thing.
100%Overall
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Hands down, Shane English is a great place to get your feet wet in the teaching English game. A very difficult thing in Taiwan is working with Taiwanese management as their approach won't always align properly with yours. Shane has a terrific support structure to accommodate this with Western Management readily available to help. The managers became good friends of mine and I still keep in touch with them today.
Shane places a strong preference on academic achievement and professionalism. Some people don't like dressing up for work- I relished wearing a shirt and tie. I took my job seriously and presenting myself correctly was a key part to that.
The team I worked with has remained in my life even though I am no longer in Taiwan. I have traveled to visit fellow teachers, been to their weddings, and continue to keep in touch. Shane does an excellent job selecting top notch teachers with great personalities and a love for their jobs. Working with them made my job a lot more enjoyable.
If I could improve anything about the school, it would be two things. The first, I believe that initial compensation should be a little bit higher. By no means is it low, but it was a little bit lower than my friends' working for other schools. They make up for this by giving two days off a week, having an excellent support system, and making it very easy to take holidays- very important aspects that I think outweigh the salary issue (all of which made my friends jealous). The other thing is that some of the schools could use a bit of a facelift. They are all clean, safe schools that make for great working conditions, but some of them have lost that "new car" smell.
These two things are really nitpicky and shouldn't detract you from pursuing a job with Shane. If my friend went to Taiwan to teach, I would strongly suggest they look at this school- it's a great way to start out.
To be honest, there were some benefits working for Shane Vietnam. The local Vietnamese staff are friendly and helpful, and the children in the classes are pleasant and fun to teach. However, I had so many problems working for them that you really should just avoid this school altogether.
Firstly, their rate of pay is lower than the average for working in HCMC. The hours are incredibly unreliable and change from week to week, and whatever hours they promise you, you will lose a whole days worth of wages a month due to them trying to cut costs and having a Vietnamese teacher take your lessons once every month. This doesn't sound like much but firstly, as I said, your hours are not steady throughout the year anyway, and secondly, from my experience, no other English Centre uses this policy this way (some share with Vietnamese teachers, but no other school causes the teacher to lose out from it).
The main thing that is terrible about working at Shane is the higher-ups don't give a flying f*** about their employees or really the children. Everything is money to them, and if you can spread out an hours worth of lessons to cover two two hour lessons, then so be it, you get more money from the students that way. They have limited resources and there's no sign of improvement. Also, when a teacher discovered that one of the children might be suffering from abuse, the Dos chose to turn a blind eye, because upsetting the parents would mean upsetting the payer.
Also, they treat their teachers abominably. When I decided to move on to another school, they docked my whole last month and a half's pay-check because apparently I owed them money from being recruited from the UK (I didn't receive a dime when I was recruited, they apparently paid their sister company SaxonCourt for me, and then I was supposed to pay for my liberty - situation sound familiar?) and because they press-ganged me into taking their medical insurance. Upon leaving, my Dos informed me that because they were absorbing my last pay check, I was allowed to keep my medical insurance that was paid up-front for the coming year. Because of this, I decided not to make a fuss, and even carried on working for a further two weeks so not to leave them without a teacher even though I knew I was not getting paid. Since then it turns out, that they have decided to cancel the medical insurance, even though they cannot get any of the money back from it, and despite the fact that I paid for it. This is just a vindictive and horrible thing to do, and the question is, would you want to work for a company who is prepared to screw you over just because the higher-ups are petty, dreadful excuses for human beings?
I would hope your answer was no.