Avoid Like the Plague

ABCi claimed to reimburse travel for its volunteer teacher trainees. However, having left 2 months ago, I still have not received a penny from them. Unfortunately, there is no written obligation from ABCi in their contract with trainees to pay travel reimbursements. However, since this was a core element in their job advertisement on The Guardian and TEFL Jobs websites, this is a clear case of false advertising.

Having complained to ABCi about this on numerous occasions, they now no longer respond to emails. Previous responses have been unprofessional and claimed former volunteers are no longer registered with ABCi. I am also deeply suspicious of reviews left on online forums. For example, the review, written by a person called 'Millie', appears to contradict the claims made against ABCi regarding travel reimbursements. Whilst Millie may be a former student from a different placement who did recieve her travel reimbursement, there was nobody of that name on the April - August 2015 intake.

The trainee contract is written in German and ABCi refuses to provide a written translation into English. I was instead assured during the interview stage of the application process that it would be verbally translated upon my arrival in Austria. This service was never provided, in spite of requests being made several times. However, after using Google Translate, I am deeply concerned about the organisation's insurance policy (or, more accurately the lack of it) with regards to its volunteers, who are not recoginsed as official employees or associates during their three-month voluntary placements. This is particularly worrying given that teaching takes place in an Active Learning environment, where children are running around inside classrooms, and with sporting activities and lessons making up a crucial component of the project weeks. Although trainees undertook a day of training with the Red Cross (as they are obliged to under Austrian Law), we never received formal training on how to safely teach sports or deal with any injuries that may occur. Given the lack of clear insurance policy and procedure, this is clearly unsafe for both trainees and the young students they teach in Austria.

The contract contains no statistics whatsoever in such important elements as the number of working hours required of volunteers, dates and amounts of reimbursement money to be paid, or classroom sizes teachers can expect to teach. Nor does it specify any obligations on the part of the organisation to provide safe and secure accommodation for its volunteers. In fact, it does not even stipulate the nature of labor which was to be expected of us. This had implications for the volunteers on my placement as we were expected to assemble furniture for ABCi's offices after a full day of teaching in late July, even though the welcome pack clearly states that volunteers could expect to have their afternoons free after the intensive CERTesol component of the course, which had ended two months before. To be clear, this was not a voluntary option and were not provided with a way to opt-out. We were instead told one morning that after school that day we would be driven to the new office to build furniture. The furniture building took two hours longer than expected. We were then housed in the old office, and expected to sleep 10 of us in 9 beds (which had been constructed by the volunteer office interns), and provided with only one shower, which was broken, and two kitchen hobs with no oven or grill. There was also a shortage of bedding meaning I didn't have a pillow or bed sheets for several nights. This was an ongoing problem, since on our day of arrival it was clear that the apartment had not been cleaned (there were dirty razors in the bathroom, uncleaned floors and old food left in the kitchen). Again, I did not have a pillow or duvet cover. This is highly demonstrable of the way in which ABCi routinely disregarded the welfare of its volunteers.