I am currently a teacher at SAS. The number of vacancies is not to do with a declining pay package. We still receive the 10% retirement and next year our salary increase is about 4.6%. After speaking to the teachers leaving, they are all leaving for different reasons, most of which are related to having been at the school for a significant amount of time and it is simply time to move on to new challenges. I don't find Shanghai to be too expensive on our salary as it is really only the food that I notice being significantly dearer than when we started here 5 years ago. We don't pay accommodation, utilities, etc. and so there are not too many day-to-day expenses (unless you want to dine out a lot etc.) As a previous poster said, last year there were very few vacancies at the Pudong Campus, and this year is simply "evening things out". Despite problems with the board, teachers are very happy teaching here and I would not be deterred by the number of vacancies. I would also like to add that the number of duties and responsibilities is not going up at all. High school teachers do about 6 hours of duty a year (this does vary by division) and we are only expected to be involved in one activity or sport from our second year of teaching for which we are paid a stipend. If a teacher has more responsibilities then they have chosen to do that.

While I don't know about all these schools, I do know that IS Beijing has an excellent reputation and so does the International School of Budapest. Sorry, I don't know anything about the other schools you mentioned.

My husband and I are a teaching couple, and this is our seventh year teaching overseas. We are currently in our second school and my advice would be to attend a job fair. I personally feel the expense is an investment in your new job and is insignificant compared to the cost of moving overseas, setting up a new house etc. In our case, both fairs resulted in jobs where our savings were good - we easily spend much more money each year traveling during our holidays. Our first job was in an OK school, but we saw it as a stepping stone to the school of our dreams (where we are now). Although it was in a country we initially were not interested in, I do not regret our decision to take the jobs. We were able to get our "foot in the door", network, familiarize ourselves with the American curriculum (we are not American), and it was this first job that led to the school of our dreams. Most of the people I know who manage to get their dream jobs via Skype interviews etc. have contacts in those schools, extensive international school experience, or are in hard-to-fill areas. Our second job fair in Bangkok, particularly, gave us plenty of contracts to choose from. We were advised by our superintendent at our first school to arrange early interviews with the recruiters who arrived early - and this paid off. We were offered jobs at our two top choice schools on the first evening of the job fair, and several other job offers rolled in over the next couple of days. We have two dependents, and at that stage did not have any IB or AP experience. For our first job fair I was very unsure about what to do, and so I subscribed to Joy Jobs. I feel a lot of the advice I received from them was very worthwhile and the process of the job fair was not so intimidating. In terms of contacting the school directly (which I did for our second positions) - I found that I heard back from every one of the schools I contacted, but it was a lot of work. I made sure that I read their website to find out about the school, and then personalized my email to the school so it did not come across as a generic application and stood out a little more. I kept it brief with what I felt were our best selling points, and then attached a concise resume (1-2 pages) as a PDF file. I also never sent my emails to who they asked you to on their website (usually an HR person), but instead to the principal of the school we were applying to. This often took a little more searching to find the email address as they are not usually listed on a website, and in some cases I just guessed their email address based on the format of email addresses at the school. From what I remember, most of these emails resulted in interviews at Bangkok, with several of them before the fair started. If you need any more advice them I am pleased to offer any based on our own experiences.