I had a terrible experince and was handeled by very inept people at the school.

First I was working in a decent school before I left to go to Beijing to start work with them. I was coming to the end of my visa so they were working hard to transfer and get it all sorted. I had to leave the country and return on a tourist visa. Then when i returned there was an incedent ith the schiool. A teacher was getting deported. I somewhat met the teacher but i never got that side fo the story.

As i was working straight away on a tourist visa, I was hid in one of the school's libraries when a policeman visted the school for a unrealated issue, and the entire teaching staff walked out and were given a staff meeting where we were told what was going on. THey said that due to the teacher mentioned earlier they had the police breathing down their necks but it was ok as they had taken out the right people to lunch, aka bribed them.

Over two months they worked to get me a visa. I have all the credentials and getting a visa should have been easy, but no. I was told i had to do another visa run. Off to Hong Kong I go and they deney me a tourist visa and a buissness visa. Now I'm in a tight spot. I can't go abck to China to pack up all my belongings in a rented out flat. The school send me to Bangkok to get a buissness visa, and no luck I treid hard to get it all sorted and i ahd to return to my home country.

Back home they tell me they will start the process from scratch and it should be done in a few months, 2 months become 6 months. I'm also in a tight spot becasue of my flat in Beijing with all my stuff! I work a deal with the school to pay the rent and I will pay them back when i start work with them. But they tell me to send the key for the flat and they will empty it and tell the landlord i moved out.

So when i return with a proper working entry visa I get a new flat and i get my stuff back. But things are missing. Yep items were stolen The guy who moved all my stuff out said it wqas my fault since i didnt give him a list of all my things. I couldn't go to the police to report the crime as they didnt get me a proper visa. I had a proper z visa but it was listed for shanghai and not beijing. I asked what would happen if the police came and they said ' you're training.'

No one in the school's center had a proper leagal working visa for teaching.

This alone should be testament to the school's hiring capabilities.

No, you should remember that you are going to China and many employers have arrangements with

their local police.

That must explain the string of employee arrests Elan has had in just the past two years, their airtight arrangements with the local police, including the surprise police inspection at the local branch where I worked.

we've all had to resort to that I suppose- all cash isn't it!

Don't make your desperation for cash bleed into a willingness to tell other people to risk incarceration for a meager paycheck, especially when there are plenty of other legal options to making a comparable income in the same profession.

You're waxing lyrically sarcastic , Dear Boy, for I never suggested anything was air-tight. Life is a chancy business. I am saying as a philosophy that we shouldn't be frightened of our own shadows. In fact we do have deprived FT's who never managed to get a degree. So what does poor old Fred Jones do, he's 59 without a degree and lives in a bedsitter in Exeter, where in his case he will remain unless he gets the Thai people to print him out a degree on the way to China. Now, am I right or am I right?

Never do this and give everyone a miss asking you to do this.
I had an offer with them and they wanted me to go on a tourist visa and change it once I got there.

Yes, well, don't you pay any attention to, Another Willie, he has a track record of using wing-and-a-prayer-visas himself. The last time he went he got the sack from two jobs in his first two weeks in China, and had to accept an invitation to use a fill-in-job in USA which was to commission two new universities for them- we've all had to resort to that I suppose- all cash isn't it!

I think that's probably correct. The pieces of that jigsaw all fit together as far as I can see..

No, you should remember that you are going to China and many employers have arrangements with their local police. So grab that L visa and away you go. You tell Another Willie to sling-his-hook with his bad advice.

Dunno about the arrangements that many employers have with their local police STILL being failsafe! Not saying you're wrong, mind!

Well, it appears Herr Doktor has indeed slung his hook! That must make you and some others very happy!

I agree with you!

Thanks for the heads up. I had an offer with them and they wanted me to go on a tourist visa and change it once I got there. They didn’t ask me to bring my tefl or letters verifying two years experience teaching but they still wanted my ba degree legalized so I’m guessing they were gonna do the same thing with me; apply me for some job that’s not teaching insofar as the visa. I’ve had a couple other offers in China and always they ask for either the Tefl or two years rec letters if it’s a teacher z visa. After I read this and some other posts about landlords and not being able to register with police due to the wrong visa, I told HR at Elan I would only work there with the correct legal kind of visa and only if they found me an apartment and had it waiting when I arrived and in their name. They said oh yeah sure no problem we’ll get the proper visa. Abt the apartment they said they’d find one, put it in my name, and deduct the money from my paycheck including the standard 2 or 3 months rent / deposit. I said no, given what happened to another teacher being left homeless because you guys got the wrong visa, I want it in the schools name and I don’t wanna pay deposits etc (ie the standard situation for teaching in korea). They said, get this, “we can’t do that because it wouldn’t be fair to other teachers.” Lol. I asked them why they don’t just help all their teachers out that way if their teachers desire it. I told em sorry but given your reputation I can’t have it any other way. Of course they refused so I told em buh-bye!

Hey,

I currently have a job offer from Elan in beijing. Firstly they sent me on the contract and the job title is teacher. Is it still illegal for foreigners to work there? Anybody have any recent information about them?

Thanks.

My most recent information on them is that the Chinese Elan chain, under Time China Education Holdings, Ltd., merged with Bright Scholar Education Holdings, Ltd. (NYSE:BEDU). They moved their incompetent curricular director to recruitment director, so hopefully they hired someone with an iota of knowledge about second language acquisition into that empty slot.

Just a heads up in case anyone gets confused by this crap firm's switch of its corporate label.

I wanted to add something about their illegal hiring practices, as other respondents have commented on.

They are not legally a school. As a result, they cannot hire "teachers". So what they do is they will hire you under a false job title. They hired me as a computer engineer or something like that. I asked my colleagues and the ones that knew told me all sorts of odd jobs, like marketing and accounting. Why is this a problem, you ask?

First, when the police bust down the door for an inevitable raid, they will see you standing in front of a class full of kids and know that you aren't doing marketing or IT. You will be arrested. You will be deported.

Second, when you inevitably quit or get fired, your next job must somehow be related to whatever fake job they gave you. My current employer is now forced to bend the truth and say that my current job has something to do with computers, even if it doesn't specifically.

I also wanted to add that the reason I know this is because they made me sign a second contract a month or so after started. I told them let me look at it, and I saw the different job title. This is where I knew something was up.

Finally when I tried to quit, they started demanding a 15,000 RMB penalty for giving them less than three months notice. It's not written in the contract, but in the "handbook", to which the contract says you must follow. I did not pay this penalty. I threatened to get the police and labor department involved. I got out without paying, but just barely.

Bottom line, do not work for this company, ever. They are poison. They are vile. Oh and they pay non whites less than whites. I found that out right after I quit. All of this is just the worst stuff. There was endless other lies, cheating, deception, and cruelty going on daily.

Wow~~Thanks for your informative reply! It really helps! BTW, do you have any materials related to their Elan courses (E1-1, E1-2, etc) by any chance?

That's not an accident. Jonathan [edited] explained in detail how some pedagogically apathetic stock broker basically bought some license to the South Korean brand, but then had to wangle some illusion of a competent curriculum together, so he directed the guy who taught his daughters (that is, Jonathan, with no curricular development experience) to shit out a series of lesson plans for the entire chain.

Un-miraculously, they managed to keep all of the worst parts of the South Korean Elan's curriculum intact. Elan still uses those godawful Houghton Mifflin Harcourt StoryTown books, which were never meant for ESL students, but instead compose part of the "learn-like-the-natives-learn" pitch to naive families with no SLA knowledge.

I know all about it. It's basically a scam, and you'll risk real jail time if you go.

Here was my submitted review to various websites.

- The HR department outright lies about the legality of employees' visa statuses to get them to work illegally. This has led to the imprisonment of around ten foreign Elan employees in just the last year.

- The Foreign Affairs Manager, Ryan Sun, had the gall to chastise me for immediately returning home after the Beijing police had informed me that I was not permitted to work under my current status (holding a Z visa receipt, but not yet a Z visa in my passport), and thus should not remain on the premises. I received explicit information in both English and Chinese (I speak both) from said officers explaining why my documentation was insufficient during this police inspection, and yet Mr. Ryan Sun still sought to reprimand me for being "unprofessional" because I obeyed police orders.

- The class materials were developed by Elan's incompetent Academic Director, Jonathan Hynes, and a rushed curricular development team that was clearly asleep at the wheel. Almost all of Elan's textbooks, quizzes, and other materials that centers required instructors to use were rife with vacuous drills, grammar misexplanations, misleading diagrams, lazy (and sometimes impossible) exercises, and even ridiculously many typos and grammatical errors.

- That same Academic Director also chose textbooks containing student-incomprehensible directions, created minute-to-minute schedules that were longer than students' class times, and made no real pacing or proofreading efforts in the materials he compiled. So, quizzes contained terms that were harder than those being assessed, entries mismatched parts of speech, and even made elementary lexical mistakes. He was essentially setting up students to fail.

-- There were as many as a dozen or more such errors or defects PER PAGE in many cases.

- The "native speaker" requirement was a blatant lie that kept qualified librarians from Anglophone nations from teaching, while the firm recruited English teachers from Western and Eastern Europe. This contradicts the very idea (promoted on their website) that they'll be "learning like native speakers," since students can't gain native-level proficiency from a non-natives, and the majority of them were no trained in any methodology that held any such promise for students.

- Upper management expected miracles out of a hat, without providing the appropriate authority, coordination, or directives to deliver them.

- Students were only ability-grouped if it was cost-effective. Otherwise, they were wangled into schedules by age and expected to make equal progress with those who were appropriately placed.

- Students routinely engaged in pushing matches, and sometimes even fistfights, in the lobby of the center where I worked.

- Time Education China Holdings' CEO spent an entire year-end dinner speech talking almost exclusively about how much money his business has made, and little to nothing about the efficacy of the programs he actually sells. This focus on profit over pedagogical quality trickles down to the centers, where talk about sales overrides talks about objectivity in measuring students' abilities or improvements in materials for their benefit.

- "Training" consisted of being told things everyone already knew by Academic "Director" Jonathan Hynes because he delayed the training by a month.

Here's a link to download all of their materials, in case you're interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yj8wup8yb68dbbd/Elan%20Teaching%20Materials.zip?dl=0

Hello,

I have also been offered a position with this school. They are advising me to come over on a tourist visa and then apply for a Z visa once in China (because I am yet to complete my TEFL course). I hold my bachelors degree though. Is this a wise thing to do?

Thanks,

take a public job, they follow labor law and you will have long holidays and you can work weekends in a private school on your terms, it's true u earn more !Saturday is their busiest day and they all need part-timers its the nature of demand

never work for an agency! its also illegal no to work for a school that is not listed on your visa. This means you can work for only one school or company. Work for a public school and take free housing and as few hours as possible the real money is in private lessons.