Hi,

Does anyone have information on these schools? I have looked on the website but wondered if the pay and conditions were the same as for BIS? What is it like to teach there?

I am presuming it is for Vietnamese. If so, do they take students with very low levels of English?

The school in Saigon is in the Binh Chanh District. Where is that in relation to district 1? What is that area like?

Any information would be appreciated.

Also eat across the road at the stalls, the food is cheap and they have menus in English. Good luck to everyone at the fair.

Just leave a job for me when I go to the London fair please.

Psyguy, are you looking for a new job or interviewing?

We have just either gone and handed the slip in at the table after we have seen all the schools we are interested in or we have just put a 'no thanks' in their pigeon hole.

Supposed to be a good school but I have only read the reviews and they are not recent.

Is it still a good place to be?

Schools who are interested in you may put requests for interviews in your pigeon hole before the fair starts. Some schools don't do this and wait to see who turns up at their table but I think that is more unusual.

After the sign-up morning, when you set your interviews, you should have an idea of your schedule. If you do have interviews then you won't know if you will have a second later on, so need to be available. You might end up waiting around for a school to contact you when you could have gone off sight seeing but then again a school might contact you and you may have a job.

If we had no interviews at all then we would go sightseeing maybe on the day before you leave. However everyone should have interviews unless you are not being open at all. The hotel is by the river so you can take the riverboat and get to see a lot. You can do this after the fair anyway, it helps to clear your head.

Good luck at the fair. Make sure to tell us how the fair went when you get back.

Thanks for your replies.

I get excited and scared when I picture myself in any country I care to imagine. Today it's Thailand, tomorrow its Portugal. Then before the job fair it gets narrowed down until it will be only one. Still exciting but not as exciting as before when there seemed to be all these options. I think that is part of the fun of moving on, not knowing where you're going to end up.

When I got my first IS job, I interviewed one week and was there the next. I didn't know to even think about what could go wrong. I was young and naive and I wanted an adventure. I probably won't do that if I had had all this information we have today and would have missed out.

Now I am looking for a job again and I am reading everything I can find on schools and countries before I even apply. Have I lost my spirit of adventure? How about you?

If people are upset by what he says i don't understand why the person who is asking the questions just doesn't delete what he said. Sometimes that person will continue arguing with him. If you don't want him to say anything on your thread then you can delete his comments.

His posts have contained good advice but also somethings which have been very wrong. (Like his view of the middle east.) I am glad I am not a newbie as this forum can sometimes make it all more confusing.

I think the early deadline for saying when you leave benefits the schools more than the teachers. Yes, some people will get jobs before the jobs fairs but how many are there really? Not loads, not the majority of teachers.

I think this forum helps to make people panic about not having a job by the end of December. There are only a few 'top' schools and they only have a small turnover, so most of us will end up in perfectly decent tier 2 schools and get our jobs at the fairs or sometime in February.

Only part of the IS community go to job fairs. There are other good schools about, that pay fairly well and have reasonable workloads and they don't fill their all their vacancies by end of December. Agencies and schools want us to feel that we need to get job really early or we will have no job come September and so we take anything at the job fairs.

Actually I know 3 couples who have jobs for next year already. They have all been because of contacts in the schools. All are IB schools, 2 are tier 1 schools.

I am an island person so I'd be okay with the lifestyle.

The article is from 2010 so what are things like now? Staff moral?

What is the typical salary? I saw something which said it ranged from 80,000 - 92,000 US with about 15% social security. Is that true? I would think 2 people on that salary would be able to live well?

Singapore may be an island but island life it is not. You'd probably have to be teaching in Bali not Jakarta to get an island experience in Indonesia and the beaches there are not very nice. Maybe the Philippines, I haven't been there. Unfortunately there has to be a school with a job before I can set off or I would be living in the South Pacific right now.

Anyone been to Bermuda?

There are jobs being advertised at Saltus Grammar School and I am thinking about applying. The cost of living there is very high and I don't know what the package is at that school.

Read the review which was good but it was recently added so I don't know if it was written by admin or not, with recruitment season in mind.

Thank you.

@ emilyhurd

Thank you, that was what I was referring to.

Thank you all for your help.

Psyguy,

On one of your many posts you had listed some good questions to ask schools.
I have tried to find the post but haven't been able to. Do you know which post it is or do you have that list handy? I just wanted to remind myself of what I should be asking.

Anyone else have some must ask questions for the school?

Thanks.

For travel to or from North America, you may get 2 bags free. For travel anywhere else you get one bag. This has been my experience.

If you change airlines you may have to pay excess, even if you paid it on the first airline. Just check first. Sometimes the cheapest flights aren't so cheap in the long run.

For my subject when a student does IGCSE they are usually prepared for DP. If they did MYP, they might or might not be, it depends on what the teacher taught.

British teachers or people from countries which have similar exams tend to be hired for IGCSE/GCSE, they know what it is, they don't need to be trained. So they are preferred. Just like it is difficult, if your aren't North American, to get into an American school.