ESL Teacher - Anonymous employee Educastream Employee Review

- Flexible hours -As long as you give enough notice, you can usually cancel lessons - Some interesting topics - I have learnt a lot of general knowledge from the presentations - You get paid even when pupils don't show up so you essentially can get paid to do something else as long as you stay on the computer - Generally very friendly staff members who are mostly quite understanding -Good pay - £10/hour lessons - Cancellations less than 3 hrs before are fully remunerated

- Lessons can get quite repetitive - they update the topics every couple of months so you may unluckily end up teaching the same lesson over 20 times - Technical difficulties - sometimes on the pupil's side although you are not scolded for these - increasingly my computer has been having difficulties which can be frustrating as it is very random when it occurs and you aren't paid for these - A lot of calls from the company to take on extra lessons - can get annoying when you are busy and keep being phoned - A few times I feel that I have been guilt-tripped into lessons by stressed staff when it hasn't really been beneficial for me to take them and I've tried to make that clear - Cancellations from pupils can be common

- I loved teaching to my regular pupils as well as some of my one-off last minute lessons. - When hired, teachers are given a practice session which, although boring, is useful. - Flexible hours. You can pick when you want to work.

- The management is very poor. There is no communication between staff and employers unless it's negative. - When you send an important email to a superior about helping a pupil, do not expect a reply. - If you have to cancel a lesson for whatever reason, they will penalise you on a point system that has no real founding and no real plus points. - You're paid by the hour but have to spend time beforehand going over the presentations...so you're not paid by the hour at all really. - The management is so poor that they told me they would not renew my contract via an email because I didn't adhere to their previous "warning" that I was cancelling too many lessons (after being ill). I had never received a "warning" email at all. They ignored this fact. - When my contract ended I was unable to communicate with my regular pupils. I never got the chance to say goodbye and no-one responded when I passed on information for their future teachers on learning techniques they responded to.