Wow, that escalated quickly. This has become an interesting conversation, but let’s try to put fired staff, bitter competitors, dismissed students and internet trolls behind us and try to get back to the facts a bit here. I am in an unique position to attempt to clarify the situation in the Austrian TEFL-YL scene, as I have worked and lived in Austria for over ten years and spent time with NETS, Native Speaker Network, English in Action, ABCi, all the organizations listed in this conversation thread (plus Biku). For everyone’s benefit, I am going to put pen to paper and attempt to provide an objective view of each from my experiences.

Austria is a small place and there isn’t a lot of information available about what’s really going on here because as so much of it is so new and it is a relatively small sector. These are the facts that I have collected in my decade of experience in the TEFL-YL sector in Austria, I will allow everyone to draw their own conclusions. In the interest of full disclosure, I am still in touch with many of the people named below and other staff from those organizations.

1) NETS: Working with about 50 schools in Austria. 500 EUR to 1000 EUR cash in hand per week before tax(?). No contract, no benefits or insurance, part-time work tended to come in bunches around September, February and June – other months you could expect about one week a month of work. All teachers have a college degree, one or two (including Paul) have a teaching degree. Run by two older 50+ American sport coaches (Baseball and Basketball), Harry and Paul. Working out of Güssing in Burgenland and another town in Hungary (where Harry and Paul live), although no official HQ - they call themselves an "informal association." I was a bit surprised on the first Monday when I showed up and they asked me what I was doing, as I had assumed that they would have some kind of rough guidelines or examples of project teaching to follow. No training. You need to do your own lesson planning. Some lessons included unsupervised “pair work” where two classes came together and Paul did office work on his laptop for two lessons. Others were watching Mr. Bean movies in English with German subtitles or playing baseball. All rather easy for the teacher, of questionable value for the learner. Anyways, at the end of every week, there is a rather interesting ritual where the contact teacher at the school (who has been collecting the money from the kids all week), Paul and Harry look themselves up in the conference room and divide up all the cash collected for the week. Everyone else gets their money cash in hand after this. It feels a bit like being a pirate and dividing up booty. I am relatively certain that this cash in hand was and is not being reported to the tax authorities, nor were any of the “teachers” registered as employees for tax or social benefits. That said, the clear benefit of working here is that people who Harry and Paul liked could get up to 1,500 a week cash in hand - because it's all in cash, no one reports it on their taxes. It was hard to discern a mission statement as the projects themselves were completely up to the implementation of the teachers, individual teachers were running completely different projects in rooms next to each other and how the cash got divided up at the end of the week seemed to be such a big issue, you might say the mission statement was a personal one: to be friendly enough with Paul or Harry to get as much of the pile of cash at the end of the week as possible.

2) Native Speaker Network: Working with about 50 schools in Austria. 400 EUR a week cash in hand before tax, no benefits or insurance. When I was there, work was steady throughout the year, but I have been told that it has dropped off in recent years, you can expect to have about 2 weeks of part-time work to do each month (not counting August). Most people come from a liberal arts background with no teaching qualifications, but have years of teaching experience. Austrian husband and wife team of Johannes and Margit with business background. Originally the infamous “Seven Sisters” based in Burgenland, changed their name after scandals involving teacher drug use, stopped payments and host families. A couple sessions of training per year. More recently, they teamed-up with a large Austrian bank to do free projects in schools across Austria, but this has been discontinued. They also seem to be working in Germany under the name “meinschulprojekt” where they have more projects. Strange legal structure as both owners live in Austria but the business is based in Slovakia. Currently based out of Bratislava (I assume to take advantage of much lower taxes there) but still operating in Austria, as best as I can tell, they still have many of the same people on the team teaching from the “Seven Sisters” days. This is what makes them unique on this list: the teachers are an older diverse mix of aging GenXers and baby-boomers (and a few genuine hippies) who seem to have just stopped their trip around the world “to find themselves” and settle down in Slovakia and Hungary as self-declared “artists and teachers.” Neither of the owners has a background in teacher, they are trained business people. Projects themselves are rather loosely run, no standard projects, you need to do your own lesson planning: the teachers have a lot of freedom to implement whatever they want in the classroom. This is nice if you’re an experienced teacher, but for younger teachers (or bad older teachers), it doesn’t work as well and it is of course better to have more training and support in the implementation of project work. We weren’t really told about a mission statement while we were there, but the two owners are very much profit-oriented and the mission statement seems to be to operate as a profitable business and make as much money for the two owners as possible.

3) Biku: working with about 30 schools in Austria. 400 EUR a week bank transfer + accommodation expenses before tax. They paid teaching staff via an “honoratnote” – that means it’s not a “real job” and you don’t get pay and benefits, and you’re responsible for paying for your own tax on what you make and that they use the same reimbursement form to pay you that you would get reimbursed for food and travel with. Most teachers had no teaching qualifications, they were just native speakers. Based out of Sankt Pölten, another classic language school run like a business = native speakers paid low and English learners charged high. Interestingly, run like a business by a teacher at a local school who should know better. There is part-time work through the year, but nothing steady. No training or support, I saw first-time teachers have nervous breakdowns in the classroom and leave the school because they had no idea what to do. The projects themselves have basic themes like “jobs” or “culture” or “business” and the teacher is supposed to create a project based on whatever the school requests. Obviously there is not enough time to customize a 30-unit project week on demand so in reality most teachers end up doing the same things over and over again or having the kids create posters, powerpoint presentations or do “scavenger hunts” where they run around the school taking photos of things with a camera. Biku has lost a lot of market share recently and is branching out into other things like after school tuition and summer camp weeks. Mission statement is vaguely educational, but not really clear to staff or students.

4) ABCi (aka The English Teacher Training College and ABCi): working with about 1,200 schools in Austria. 1,700 EUR to 2,700 EUR a month before tax – staff are registered with the Austrian authorities and have access to benefits: healthcare, pension and social insurance for things like sick leave and maternity leave (NOTE: As they are not staff, student teachers on the programme must have student visas and must purchase their own health insurance before coming to Austria). Full-time work, 14 months of paid salary (you get paid a Christmas and a Summer bonus that doubles your salary in those months). All teachers have CELTA or CertTESOL, all teacher trainers have DELTA, DipTESOL, MA in TESOL or PGCE. Founded by an Australian, Ben and an American, Frank, both teachers in their 30s structured as a NPO, not a business. They were only founded 6 years ago and have grown very quickly in the past few years so there have of course been growing pains and some uneven experiences for different people - that's probably unavoidable for any organization that goes from two volunteers to fifty employees in five years. The founders take feedback seriously and I saw steady improvements with each course while I was there. Most importantly, they seem to be slowing down their growth and focusing on the quality of the experience at their 3 existing locations. Lessons are planned for each hour of the project and are designed to and run in accordance with the specifications for projects published by the Austria ministry of education. They like to say that it is a mix of task-based learning and communicative language teaching, but in practice it is a lot of different methods all using the communicative approach. You don’t have a lot of time for admin and lesson planning because about 20% of the week is taken up with driving to and from schools. That said, they already have pretty detailed lesson plans and aides for both the projects and the course so there isn't much lesson planning required. In addition, they work together with Cambridge and Trinity to provide a teacher training programme at international standard for staff that generally lasts several weeks and is supplemented by refresher training sessions about 4 times a year. The big difference between ABCi and everyone else on this list is their concentration on teacher training and the fact that the staff teaching positions are full-time jobs with benefits. They have student teachers coming in every year do a TEFL course with theory and teaching practice that includes the CertTESOL and/or CELT-P, which is different from the others on the list - the level of theoretical and practical training on this course is generally of a high standard. They run a job placement programme for all students and normally hire a few students at the end of every course. The mission statement is clear and repeated often to staff and student teachers: to provide every child in Austria with a free project by the year 2020 and offer scholarships for native speakers to study to become EFL teachers.

5) English in Action: working with about 400 schools in Austria. 100-300 EUR a week plus flights and accommodation Mon-Fri before tax. No benefits, health care or social insurance. Working from England, based out of Canterbury and sending teachers to Austria via RyanAir. Part-time “freelance” work: 4-, 6-, 8- and 12- week zero-hour contracts at various points in the year. One weekend of training. Most teachers have on-line TEFL, some have CertTESOL or CELTA. Originally a small Austrian start-up run by a lady in Burgenland, they have more recently been purchased by a large British corporation. The projects themselves are simply A2 and B1 level worksheets that have been imported from a course at evening language school for adults and tweaked to make more relevant for young learners and filled with elements of British Culture. So that is to say, the project week is very structure and the worksheets are very pretty, but it tends to turn the lessons into a lot of reading and writing, which doesn’t really make sense when you’re bringing a native a speaker into the classroom and the Austrian teachers are far better qualified to teach reading and writing than most native speakers. The corporation that brought EiA is trying to expand the project into other markets around the world, so I understand why are focusing so much on something that’s easy to standardize and scale-up like a bunch of worksheets and CDs. More active elements include children “singing” along to an English song on a CD player or showing posters they drew or running powerpoint presentations. They are externally accredited by EAQUALS to ensure international standards. Because HQ is in the UK, support in Austria isn’t great. E.G. If you are sent to a school with materials for the wrong age group, you’re just stuck with what you have, there is no way to get the other materials to you before the project is over. The difference between EiA and others on this list is that they are owned by a multi-national corporation, Stafford House School of English, which is a subsidiary company of Cambridge Education Group Limited. Corporate Mission statement is based around expanding the projects already run in Austria to the rest of the world.

There are other really small 2- or 3- person operations flying under the official radar that work at a 2-10 schools like Lilac north of Graz, “active learning” outside Pressbaum or English Project Weeks near Amstetten (as well as one-man shows where people who work out an “arrangement” with the local primary school where they live), but they are not really worth mentioning as the only way to work for them is to know the owner or the school director personally and there’s hardly enough work for them, let alone another person. There are also large language schools like EF, Berlitz and EF, but 97% of what they do is with adult learners, normally it’s just a side-show for young learners at things like summer camps or trips to London. Finally, there is of course the Holy Grail: working for a state school in Austria – something that is pretty much impossible to do if you are not an Austrian.

Those are the facts as I experienced them, you can come to your own conclusions.

For me personally, I have only found two ways to have a proper fulltime job with 14 months of salary and benefits teaching English in Austria to young learners: 1) work for the state in a compulsory school or 2) work for the English Teacher training college (ABCi).

After years of trying, I have managed to secure the first on a “sondervertrag” – but that isn’t easy to do for someone who hasn’t gone through the Austrian system and got a Lehramt here.

Everything else with young learners that I have seen is part-time, without benefits and/or of questionable legality.

Ok. That’s it. I hope that this information helps everyone make up their own minds. This turned into a much longer post than I originally intended (and I've wasted a bit more time on it than I should have), so feel free to share it on other sites to clarify the situation for anyone looking to work with young learners in Austria.