I had the misfortune of working for this school for 9 months and I have a warning for all EFL teachers: DO NOT WORK HERE.

There is one clear and obvious reason for this: the owner. She is an absolute nightmare to work with - unfriendly, cold and disfunctional. During my 9 months there, she managed to fall out with every permanent member of staff, including myself, usually more than once. On each occasion, the member of staff in question not only felt they were being accused of something that was unjustified but also that they had been treated in a bullying, rude and unprofessional manner. In my own case, a simple misunderstanding led to insults being handed out over the phone, which I apparently was expected to sit there and take. I also met many other teachers in Verona who had resigned or left the Cambridge School. All of them pointed to one single overriding factor behind their decision - the owner. Naturally, being the owner, she feels that she is all-powerful and able to act with impunity, and in this she is sadly correct. As a teacher there, you have little or no recourse to protection of any kind from either the rest of the downtrodden management or from the impenetrable wall of beuracracy that is the Italian state system. In all, the working environment at the school is frosty, unwelcoming, rancorous and depressing.

Teachers who may be thinking of signing a contract should also know that I did not get paid on time one single month. The salary is fairly derisory in any case, but of course essential for rent, bills and food. At one point near the beginning of my contract, having absolutely nothing in my account, I raised the fact that my salary was two or three days overdue. I was told that it was because of the Italian bank I had been recommended to go with by the DOS, and that I would just have to get used to it. A colleague was also consistently underpaid with no satisfactory explanation given. Added to this, my final pay cheque (when I was no longer in Italy) was €300 less than it should have been, and again this was met with evasion and a complete lack of concern when I brought it up. Make no mistake about it, this school is unscrupulous, shifty and untruthful in its dealings with staff.

In the interest of fairness, I should point out that almost all of the rest of the staff are lovely and a pleasure to work with. The staff room was reasonably well-stocked, and Verona is a lovely city.

To sum up, if you want to be employed by a badly-run, poorly-managed school where you are worked extremely hard to be treated with disdain, rudeness, suspicion and a lack of respect and gratitude by the management, then this is the place for you.