It is not an international school - Primary School Teacher The Grange School (Chile) Employee Review

- The pay is not enough for you to fund your own children’s places at the school, and teacher’s children do not get free places, even on the foreign-hire package. - In the Lower Prep, the teachers teach bilingually using mostly English resources. The Upper Prep is mostly English-medium (except Spanish, religion and subject specialists who can’t speak English e.g. PE) but in the secondary, almost the entire curriculum is Spanish-medium. I met teachers and several recent graduates of the school who could not comfortably join a conversation with me and my husband, and who could not even write a Whatsapp message in English without using google translate. It is not an English-speaking environment, although some students do pass a couple of A levels. - It is not an international school. They teach the Chilean national curriculum with little add-ons from England. Maths in particular felt like teaching in the 1960s. There is no scope for focus on deep understanding or problem solving. I know rote learning formulas for exams is common in Year 11 in England too, but it shouldn’t be the only teaching style used in primary! - They require total uniformity across all 6 or 7 classes in a year group. That means you cannot even improve things in your own classroom, because you are tied to the powerpoint slides and resources someone else made. - Provision for children with SEN is poor. The school only recently started accepting students with SEN, due to a change in the law forcing them to. There are no SALT, OTs or similar specialists at all. The provision for emotional support is insufficient for the level of need in the student body. The school does not have a good idea of what a teacher can reasonably adapt, so you might find yourself having to learn braille because you have a blind pupil in your class, and if you don't teach him braille, no one will! - Almost all of the staff are Chilean, so all CPD is in Spanish, including things like child protection. Your colleagues might be happy to translate for you, but it is obviously not an inexhaustible pool of goodwill! - Chilean teacher education is not especially similar to the UK, so you might feel surprised by the lack of inquiry based learning, differentiation and inclusion. It is very difficult to raise an alternative opinion in planning meetings, because the school considers itself to be the best in Chile, and is not really open to potential improvements. In practice, that means “we’ve always done it this way” is the final word in any situation. This applies even if you are the head of a subject. There was some pressure to ensure that current students have similar experiences to their older siblings in each year group, but that reduced with the retirement of the former head of Lower Prep. - You need a Chilean ID number to login to the software for taking the register, tracking progress and checking things like EHCPs. It might take 6 months for you to get your Chilean ID. In the meantime, you are dependent on someone else logging you in every time. - You need to be functionally fluent in Spanish because staff meetings, parent meetings and all emails are in Spanish. Even things like the printer require at least some Spanish. The subject specialist teachers in prep, as well as almost all of the teachers from the secondary school, hardly speak English. I think the only part of the school where English is the lingua-franca is the English department in the secondary school, but even there, not every teacher is a native speaker, so some things will be bilingual. - As only a tiny minority of teachers are foreign-nationals, and the contract encourages you to leave within 5 years, the culture of the school is impenetrable for foreigners. As a foreign teacher, I often felt like a decoration. There were multiple occasions when I was required to attend meetings in Spanish (before I had learned to speak Spanish) because it “looked better” if I was there too. No translation was provided, so I simply sat at the table trying not to look bored. - The support for new arrivals was insufficient. We lived in Airbnbs for months while we waited for our Chilean visas and IDs to be processed. During that time you can’t get a bank account, so you’ll be paid in cash which you have to collect from the bank and carry home. When your Chilean ID is finally ready, the support for finding housing was minimal, even if you can’t speak Spanish. I think they offered us assistance to view 3 apartments and if you didn’t want / weren’t accepted for any of those, you were on your own. Don’t expect housing, support for finding a school for your own children, a buddy-family, a tour of the city, a welcome BBQ or any of the other normal “newly arrived” experiences you might have had at other COBIS / BIS schools. It was much more similar to starting as an English teacher at a government school abroad than a typical international-school welcome. - They do provide Spanish lessons, but it took 6 or 7 weeks for the timetable to be started and the teacher would schedule other meetings in the lesson slot as often as possible because it would otherwise have been her PPA. We were strongly encouraged to find our own Spanish teachers, but again without official help. The “Australians in Chile” facebook group turned out to be much more helpful than any of the other English-speaking foreigner groups for things like Spanish teacher recommendations. - The Human Capital department are responsible for the admin of foreign teachers, but they were generally inexperienced. They would request documents by google translating the title of the equivalent document in Chile into English. I spent weeks trying to track down whatever they needed, only to discover there is no such document in the UK. It turned out they wanted something like a P45, but had no idea what the British term was and also no idea how to find it out. The newly incoming foreign teachers were encouraged to help each other and use facebook groups to figure out what documents we actually needed because they did not know how to help us. They were kind and considerate people, but not especially experienced at working with foreign documents from outside of Latin America. If you’re moving from another Latin American country, you should be fine though.