2007- A year in Eikaiwa

2007 was yet another year in which the world of TEFL made its way into the consciousness of the general public for all the wrong reasons (a crack down on teachers in Korea, English teaching sex offenders etc. etc), and Japan did its fair share of damage to our industry’s repuation too:

The biggest TEFL story of all was almost certainly the collapse of Nova, once by far the biggest chain of language schools in Japan. The good news is that G Com is planning to restart a good proportion of the schools and take on quite a few of the teachers, but of course that has not made it into the Australian, Canadian etc. newspapers that covered the collapse. The fact that their complete lack of a plan has already led to them going back on their promises on rehiring may yet do.

The other schools apparently shared my pessimism on whether the hobbyist English students from Nova would bother going elsewhere rather than taking up ikebana flower arranging, with rumours of some of the bigger schools being unable to take on all the ex-Nova students coming through their doors due to a lack of teachers and/ or classroom space.

There were a few rumours of Gaba quickly following Nova down the drain or trying to sell up, and you can see the similarities in their heavy advertising budget, high rent school properties and offer to give students classes when they like. So far they have come to nothing, and as worrying for teaching standards as a series of posters on trains promising that Gaba teachers will listen to all your problems are, it is probably a good marketing strategy as long as all that marketing doesn’t mean they are spending cash they don’t have, as Nova was.

In further proof that virtually no schools are seeing the difficult competitive atmosphere as a reason to raise the standard of teaching, Shane- the biggest foreign owned chain of schools- has cut starting salaries for new teachers yet again (at a time when the yen has also weakened against other currencies and so made the amount teachers are going to be able to send home even lower). The cuts in bonuses has also hit longer term teachers for the first time.

Other trends that have continued include universities taking on more short term teachers (and refusing to renew their contracts after 3 years so they don’t have to offer them a longer term one) and universities and schools using agencies to employ their staff, so further cutting the pay and sense of belonging of the teachers and ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) in those schools. An admin job in a dispatch company or the outside contracts part of a language school would put you in virtually the only expanding part of the market at the moment, as the half-arsed attempts the language schools have made at getting the retiring baby boomers into the classroom don’t seem to have started a flood yet.

The Ministry of Education are going ahead with their plan to introduce a few English lessons into all Elementary schools, so that could prompt some interest in kids’ classes to make up for the falling numbers of children in the industry. There has been some argument over the decision to exclude all reading and writing, including simple phonics, from the lessons- but in the short term, given the inexperience of primary school teachers, it might be a good way of insuring that the lessons don’t drift into boring JHS territory and so motivate the kids to enjoy English- until they hit Junior High School and find speaking with a good accent is going to get you any marks and might even make your friends take the piss out of you…

In summary, Japan remains a great place to live (great service, great and affordable food and drink, some dramatic scenery, loads of interesting books about Japan, things improving for non smokers and vegetarians, better Thai food and French bread than in the UK), a so-so place to teach (nice students but only negative feedback from your managers, some modern classrooms but no modern teaching methodology) and an increasingly bad place to live off teaching (you can live and save if you are frugal and single, you will struggle and worry increasingly about job security if you are not both of those).

Predictions for Eikaiwa in 2008 coming up.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 1:19 am and is filed under ALT, Gaba, Interac, Nova, Teaching English in Japan, Teaching in Japanese universities, Teaching Japanese primary school children, TEFL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.