This is clearly damage control. I have been associated with Bai Da Wei and Bai Da Wei staff for a long time, and I watched as the company went from one where the teachers clamoured to get branch (campus) classes to one where the company, in its quest to put money over staff and its ever pervasive complaints about having too many teachers under hours, is now in a situation where should one teacher get sick or leave unexpectedly twice, the scramble for cover will be intense. God help Bai Da Wei should two people in either branch or kindergarten fall seriously ill at the same time.

The PR posted twice on precisely the same day, which is suspicious, but I'll bite.

The school is not horrible and you can certainly do worse. That said, the negatives outweigh the positives more and more.

Working as a teacher in China isn’t like a normal 9 to 5 job back home.

This is true. If you are lucky enough to be split shifted, depending on how far your kindergarten or branch campus is, you will spend anywhere from 1 to 4 hours a day commuting alone, compared to approximately 4 or 5 hours of actual work that day. (Changchun drivers are incredible at not moving anywhere quickly.) The school has concentrated its teachers in one suburban district of the city, but it has spread schools everywhere. This is not told to you during your interviews, so you will not know to expect that at worst up to 9 hours of your day will be spent out of your control, of which only about half will be compensated. Many teachers are lucky and are not split shifted, but many others are, especially new teachers who do not have separate "branch" or "public school/kindergarten" contracts.

To make matters worse, when you are compensated, it'll be significantly less than other places you could go. Starting wages are approximately 6000 RMB - about 600 quid or 1000 dollars. On China, that is on the low side.

I feel the school has looked after me, but as with any workplace from time to time there will be issues to resolve – you find that in any place of work.

This is true, but for both the right and the wrong reasons. The school is desperate for employees. If you should happen to walk off the job, the school will be happy to allow you back (at massive personal expense to yourself that may or may not be SAFEA permitted). In fact, if you do not even have the credentials for a proper visa, the school will still hire you and smooth out your paperwork. This is also in violation of the SAFEA accreditation they say they have. This includes people who do not have even a basic university diploma and people who do not come from recognised English-speaking countries.

Compared to other cities in China where you are on your own to obtain residence the English-speaking (or Anglophone-understanding) staff is anaemic/non-existent, Bai Da Wei will provide you an apartment and, in addition to Maria, most of the high functioning management and administration speak excellent English. The school will help you with matters such as sending home money, utilities issues and maintenance. That said, if you are a new hire, expect to pay 500 RMB out of pocket for your apartment; this was not the case before. In terms of vehicle traffic, you will be either be relatively close (~15 minutes) to both the train station and the downtown areas, or very far (~1 hour with heavy congestion/road works). You will be offered free transportation to your work site. If you choose to not use it because you will be stuck at a location for one or two hours, you will be told to pay for your own way home. On the bright side, if transportation cannot be provided for you, you will be reimbursed for your taxi fares. However, occasionally holidays will conflict with your schedule, and you may be told to use a taxi for a long stretch of time; after this time, you can be compensated for your expenses, which may have accumulated to several hundred RMB by that point.

As I alluded to before, the company is much more interested in its profits than in the well-being of its teachers. You can see this in the non-existent management: Maria is often not there; Kyri has left, presumably permanently with the other financial backer, neither of whom were ever interested in teaching, especially Kyri who has been happy to spend a quarter of his time not actually in China; Puckett, the namesake of the school, was pushed out of the school and although you will likely interview with him, he has been long gone and will not be returning.

If you are sick, money will be taken away from you and given first to teachers who are under hours. The school says the deductions are to compensate teachers who cover you, but when they are given to staff below contract hours, the school does not generally have to compensate them, meaning that that money is pure profit for the school. If you cannot work for two days, do not be surprised when 25% of your meagre salary has been deducted. The school is so paranoid about people taking leave for fun that they will physically assist you into a clinic just to be certain you are sick.

It will come as a surprise to nobody that nepotism runs rampant in China. Such is the case at this company, where the manager of the foreign teachers has this position because of relation to Kyri. She is a good person, but not fit to be a manager, and has done such things as asking teachers to run meetings, talking to staff like five-year-olds at meetings, and seems to take matters far too personally.

Training is non-existent. It essentially covers two or three days of observation, at which point you are on your own. There are some cursory introductions to discipline and behaviour in the classroom, but there is no professional training and you are at the mercy of the competency of the teacher you shadow.

Should you be on holiday, the school will not pay you until you have returned. Ostensibly, this is to protect the school from people who run on their contract; in practice this means that many teachers will have holidays without pay disbursement, causing stress during days off. In some circumstances, you may not get paid for a very long time.

Although schedules can be horrible, the school does not do what many other schools in China do - force administrative hours. Contracts are for 20+ hours, but never 30-40 hours as occurs in China and elsewhere in East Asia. Your duty hours are strictly limited to official school functions, meetings, and teaching hours. However, you will not be compensated for time spent planning lessons.

The school occasionally provides outings, but it does the bare minimum in order to say they are there. The last outing involved a trip to a nearby city, at which teachers were treated to a free bus ride and free room. The bus had to stop every so often for farcical reasons and the free room consisted of a large dormitory hostel-like setting with no showers. The savings allows your management to go to Europe for a month.

The majority of teachers are either somewhat unhappy or incredibly unhappy with the school. Almost half of current teachers have been at Bai Da Wei for over a year; previously, the turnover was not high. At this point, it seems that most teachers will not be resigning, and many contracts are expiring soon or have already expired. These problems are not minor problems that can be fixed with one-on-ones with the management staff. These are serious underlying faults with management and the company structure and the school must learn to accept that the problems posted here by the teachers are real and serious, and cannot be solved by sweeping them under the rug by spartacus/maelstrom or punishing the staff for sharing their experiences online.

This is a Western-run school. But make no mistake; this is not a Western school and you will not be made to feel as though you are valued.