WinBe reviews

Their expectations are extremely high. There aren’t any breaks for teachers in between classes because we’re expected to do a million tasks during those “breaks”. We’ve been requested to “try not to use the restroom when there are a lot of parents in the lobby”. There isn’t enough time to thoroughly do all of the tasks assigned. It’s not just a “teaching job”, it’s also a customer service and marketing and promotion and cleaning job. My manager would rather I spend an hour putting promotional flyers in people’s mailboxes than actually prepare a lesson. They don’t care about the quality of the lessons as long as they can get 2-3 new students to sign up every month. The teachers are understaffed and underpaid.

Where do I start? The franchise company took control of all of my finances, my accommodation, my health insurance, bills which made it too difficult and frightening to quit. They forced me to buy an expensive phone which I couldn't afford so they bought it for me and took it back from my salary every month, meaning the entire time I was working for them I owed them money. I was bullied and humiliated by the head trainer during the initial training week, I was bullied by my manager and the Japanese English teacher at my school. Most of the kids were spoilt rotten and nasty. I had to teach six classes in a row with no breaks on Tuesdays, all different levels. My manager was bullied by the franchise company so she took her frustration out on me. Kindergarten level classes were chaotic hell. The syllabus was garbage, of course. The level system was age-based rather than level based so a lot of kids learned absolutely nothing and quit. When students quit it was always my fault not the fault of the level system or the syllabus. If two kids didn't get on, THAT was my fault, too. The boss of the franchise company would come in and yell at everybody if there was a problem. I had to take a day off to go to the doctor with a work preventative illness, because of this they told me the franchise boss was angry and I better hope he doesn't come in. I also had to listen to people talk about me in an insulting way in Japanese while I was standing right there. The teacher before me had no experience of class discipline and just played meaningless games with the students. This resulted in terrible behavior and an expectation from the children that I basically just entertain them, and as they treated the previous teacher as basically another kid they tried that with me. When I got the students disciplined in a matter of a couple of weeks I got no gratitude or credit from my manager, but instead just more complaints and bullying. I desperately wanted to quit after just a couple of weeks but for all I knew the franchise company would mess with my finances, charge me rent for the rest of my agreed contract or the franchise boss would come and scream in my face or worse. I had no choice but to try to endure the hell of working for WinBe for a year and then get the hell away from them. To quit just seemed too risky and far too messy. From talking to other teachers it seemed that getting a situation like mine was 50/50 with WinBe. If you want a job worse than the worse job you have ever had, you might wanna try your luck with this company.