Clifford School is a Pre-K to 12 private school that offers two programs: Bilingual and Manitoban. The school is approaching 3000 students and hires 80+ Western Staff. The school only hires certified teachers to teach in regular classrooms (certified means a teaching certificate and/or a Degree in Education from his/her home country - not a TESL certificate). Specialist teachers (computers, art, music, and ESL staff) don't need certification as long as they have enough experience (though certification is preferred). The majority of teachers stay at the school for two to three years with a good number of staff staying on longer.

The Bilingual Program prepares the students for admission into Chinese Universities. Therefore it follows the Chinese curriculum, but with a strong English component. The English program shadows the Chinese Science, Social Studies, and Maths curriculum - teaching it how it would be taught "at home," so the students are learning the same subjects in two distinctly different ways. Even though the teachers are teaching curricular subjects, the focus is linguistic development. The students are generally second language learners from China (the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan).

The Manitoban Program is much smaller than the Bilingual Program in terms of student numbers, but hires more than a third of the Western staff. In order to work in this program one needs to be certified in the province of Manitoba (Canada) - though exceptions are made if a Manitoban teacher cannot found for a position. They follow the provincial curriculum in order to prepare students for university studies abroad. The students must hold an international passport for enrollment (this also includes Hong Kong and Taiwan).

The package offered for the teachers is comparative of international school packages, but isn't quite as good as other international schools (the American Schools, Intl. School of Beijing, Concordia, and the like). The teachers work like they would in regular international schools, but with far fewer responsibilities. Due to this, the teacher demographic tends to be younger teachers.

While the school is not perfect, I would hesitate at calling it a "crap" school or "fake." I hope this helps answer your question.