The ajarn.com BIG issue Teacher Agencies

The concept behind the teacher agency is perfectly simple. A school or institute, for various reasons, is finding it difficult to employ decent teachers, so it turns to a 'middleman' to recruit its teaching staff. Enter stage right - the good old teaching agency. "How many teachers do you want? When can they start? Monday? No problem at all squire. We've got some of the best teachers that Bangkok has to offer on our books. You just leave it with us" And that's all there is to it......or is it?

We first need to examine the reasons why many schools and universities are washing their hands of the task of hiring teachers and deciding to call in the middlemen. For many institutes, they just don't have the Thai administration staff with the ability to distinguish between a career teacher and the guy who's going to ride off into the sunset the moment he gets his first pay packet ("but he seemed so genuine at the interview") A lot of schools have been bitten many times by fly-by-night teachers. The whole situation is becoming painfully embarrassing for them. Thai school owners are beginning to lose major face when their newly hired teacher doesn't show up on Monday of the second week because of some 'domestic crisis'. Other schools face problems with their location. How do we persuade a teacher who's maybe low on funds to travel from Bangkok to the middle of nowhere for a job interview? Then there are the schools who just don't want the responsibility. "It's just too much of a headache" So they turn to the teacher agency.

If you're looking for a definition of a teacher agency, I guess it's someone who benefits financially from the teacher's employment. The money can be got in several ways with the most common being the monthly deduction method. The school will pay the agency let's say 40,000 baht a month, and the agency will pass on 32,000 baht to the teacher. Sometimes more, very often less. There are people who say well, as long as the school is happy with the teacher, and the teacher and agency are satisfied with the financial arrangement, then there's surely no problem. And that's fair comment. Many of Bangkok's largest and best known language schools have acted as teacher agencies for quite some time. They offer teacher support and training, and more importantly they can usually find a replacement teacher within a very short period of time. Remember.......when a teacher doesn't turn up for work, it's the agency's responsibility to send another body.

The currently disturbing trend is the increase in the number of dodgy, crooked and downright devious agencies (very often one-man shows) that are setting up office all over Thailand, particularly in Bangkok. Although they weren't as prevalent in the past, they were certainly around. One only has to think back four or five years to the boyfriend and girlfriend couple who ran a teaching agency from a shop-house in Sukhumwit 56. They persuaded several big-name secondary schools to hand over substantial amounts of cash for the promise of as many qualified experienced teachers as they wanted. And schools fell for the scam left, right and center. At the start of term there wasn't a teacher to be seen and the boyfriend / girlfriend couple were on a plane to Ethiopia with pockets bulging. The Thai police did take up the case but I'm pretty certain nothing came of it.

Most of my 'insider information' on teaching agencies tends to come from a select group of ex-teaching colleagues. These are teachers who are very qualified and extremely capable but lack the confidence to go for the better teaching jobs. It's only a matter of time before they fall foul of the unscrupulous teacher agencies.
One very good friend of mine went for a job last week at an address on Soi Asoke. For those who know that part of town, it's about as run-down and neglected as business areas come, with many multi-national companies upping sticks and relocating to areas such as Sathorn and Rangsit. What's left behind are poorly-managed office buildings offering cheap rents in a desperate attempt to get tenants. Exactly the kind of set-up where my ex-colleague Marvin found himself.  The agent who interviewed him in a sparse office containing a desk, a phone and a fax machine, wasn't interested in qualifications or resumes. He just needed a body in a classroom. A native-speaking body to be precise. The agent had one school on his books with a requirement for six teachers. Interestingly it's a Thai secondary school that I'm fairly familiar with. I know several teachers that have worked there and not one has managed to stay longer than a couple of weeks. Even the better teacher agencies won't touch this place, because it's a school that views farang teachers as nothing more than a necessary evil. Obviously as a last resort, they've turned to the agent on Soi Asoke.

Ajarn.com readers answered my call and emailed me with their own experiences and comments on the subject of teacher agencies. Chris is obviously not a great fan.

Just a couple of very brief comments, maybe somewhat subjective, but definitely based on my own earlier experience in Thailand. ,and on that of a few acquaintances and close friends:

- No, they are not a prerequisite for the employment chain. Anyone with the confidence to be a teacher, has the confidence to organize himself with a list of schools and do his own walk-in interviews. It is a proven fact that this formula works best.
- The vast majority of these agencies, alas, are doing it strictly for the money and exploiting the situation that a great many schools in Thailand do not have the foggiest idea of how to go about recruiting anyone from janitors to directors of studies.

- The schools are easily taken in by the smooth-talking ex beach-bar bully from Phuket who swears that all his teachers are qualified and experienced. This way, the schools themselves never get to see these ‘qualifications’, often assuming that the placement agency is the employer, and that the agency has provided the necessary working documents.

- Some of the agencies are not content just to rip the schools off, several have been known to adopt a systematic scam : They go round the guesthouses at the moment of the start of the new school year when the schools are getting desperate (they have the budget, but will lose it if they don’t find a teacher) and recruit tourists who have almost run out of funds but wish to extend their stay into the rainy season. They then demand a one-off payment from the school as a placement fee. When they have done this a couple of dozen times, and the teachers are gaining their first experience in hell holes of filthy, hot concrete bunkers with 60 screaming slum kids, they quietly abandon their rented office accommodation to beat it back to the bliss of the beaches with a bag-full of baht – popular destination : Sihanoukville in southern Cambodia. The teachers bang in vain on the office door at the end of the month for their salary…
The main advice for prospective teachers is :
The smaller and cheaper the job ad, the smaller and cheaper the nasty person behind it. Gags like teacher job ads printed on paper napkins and beer-mats in Banglamphu are really only going to appeal to those that use them : losers and boozers.

Dee in Chiang Rai sounds like a tired soul desperate to escape from the shackles of her teaching agent. She had this to say.

I make very little money while the agency sells me for a profit...a profit that goes straight into the boss's pocket. He charges the high school I'm at about 450 an hour and pays me 250. I am a professional teacher w/ 17 yrs. experience, an MA in English and a teaching credential (the real thing). The agency has not secured my visa, I'm on a tourist visa. They did not set up housing, I'm at a guest house. I'm working full time and I don't even have a damn kitchen!

I don't get it. Why do people work in Thailand? I've been coming here for years on holiday and, yes, it's a great country, but the pay is inexcusable! I'm teaching so a guy can get rich? I worked in China (a third world country, despite the propaganda) and was reimbursed my full air fare, given a free luxery two bedroom apt., and transport to/from work. And my salary was $200 more than the lousy $600 I make here. As I said, I don't get it. Why would any qualified person work here?

Let's hear from another vulnerable young lady who obviously had a narrow escape. I've edited the original post to protect the identity of the agency.

I wanted to make a comment on the teacher's agencies acting as a middleman for schools and instructors. I think it's a complete waste of my time and I personally don't think that teachers need agencies to help them out. This isn't a modeling agency and we don't need agents, as this isn't a cat walk event. Some agencies that pretends' to have an office, usually the entire office is a dinning table in their kitchen. I had been looking for work past few weeks and e-mailed my resume to uncountable places. One of them in particular (email addresses omitted) caught my attention. The man who runs this so called teacher's agency is a pest. He keeps e-mailing me and annoying me ever since i e-mailed him my resume. I finally made up my mind and went to meet him, as his address was not familiar to me, I didn't really know where I was going. Though I was shocked when i got to his "so called office" or should I put it as a dinning table with a laptop. That man had enough nerve to ask me for a 30,000-40,000 Baht commission once he helps me find work. I did ask him why he didn't deal with the school directly... he said "the school wouldn't even know that I'm your agent, and when you go in for the interview don't tell them who refered you to the school... make believe you applied to it yourself". Believe me Philip I ran out of there in 5 minutes and it scared me to death.

So here we have another approach. Not the monthly deduction method, but a grabbing, grasping one-off job placement deal. The plot thickens. Some of these teacher agents are enjoying more notoriety than others. The same name keeps cropping up again and again on Dave's ESL Cafe. Jim Anderson certainly won't ever forget it.

I have very little doubt you haven't heard of ******* or ******** - a fake agency that is taking hordes of money from unsuspecting ESL teachers searching for jobs online. I fell prey to them about three months ago, mostly due to my lack of knowledge regarding typical salaries paid in various provinces.

I received an e-mail from a ********* (whose name is getting splattered on many ESL discussion boards) who advertised a very high salary being offered by the ******** school in Thailand. His e-mail mentioned a fee up-front for visa processing and later a 25% fee for the first months salary. No excuse, but my time has been running out here in China where I'm teaching at a bilingual school in Guangzhou, so I wanted something concrete and was willing to pay well for it. At first he asked me to send him my credentials, all original documents, to him, which I refused to do. I simply told him he would get copies and would have to deal with that or the deal was off. He accepted the documents and then wanted a total of 2500 Baht for the processing, which I wired to him via Western Union. He sent me an e-mail detailing not only his address in Bangkok (which I can provide to you) but also his bank information for money transfer (in case Western Union didn't work out) and phone numbers.

Long story short, I should have known it was a scam because he was claiming that the ******** School was offering 48,000.00 Baht a month for it's ESL teachers (an outrageous amount for that area, which I would have known had I researched it a bit more). After wiring him the money, he disappeared off the face of the earth for a bit until finally I received an e-mail (again which I can provide to you) from him, claiming they had changed their policy and could no longer wait until the teacher was placed in the job because so many of their (supposed) past BAD clients still had not paid their 25%, so he required me to send half of the 25% salary now (total was 12,000.00 Baht) which was 6,000.00 Baht, in order to ensure he was going to collect his fee for getting me a job.

I flat out refused and basically told him what I thought of him and informed him that I would be notifying Dave's ESL Cafe of his little scam and that (by that time) I had done some research and obtained an e-mail address from the school directly and they had told me that ********* was a scam and many other ESL teachers had complained about getting trapped in their scam.

Obviously, I never heard from him again. But, I've been corresponding with Dave Sperling. I've kept all the receipts from the Western Union wire and all the original e-mails from this scumbag and it's obvious to me that he is definitely in Bangkok and still scamming and sucking money from the pockets of unsuspecting ESL teachers. Dave Sperling wants to see this guy go down too, as his board is lighting up with many other victims of this sick SOB.

One question some of you must be asking is how much are these agents making? A quick phone call, and an ajarn.com insider emerges from a doorway with a ledger-shaped bulge protruding from under his nylon windcheater. Is that a ledger or are you just pleased to see me?