We appreciate your feedback which will help us improve our work. However, we would like to clarify the following points:

1. Visas
Best Learning offers work visa (Z visa) sponsorship to all teachers who possess the necessary qualifications, pass the whole recruiting process and are hired. In any situation that the foreign employee needs to look for another job in China (either because the contract is completed or the employee has personal reasons), he/she needs to get new visa sponsorship from the new company. Z visa holder can only work for the company that offers the sponsorship, which is the general rule regulated by the Chinese government.

2. Pay / Working Hours
We Provide our foreign employees with competitive salaries by industry standards. At Best Learning, we have a system to calculate your payment based on your qualifications and the system is totally transparent to all employees. The foreign teacher's income will include three parts: base salary, housing allowance and additional payment by teaching hour. You will get the same amount of the base salary and housing allowance every month but the additional payment by teaching hour will depend on how many hours you actually teach in the classroom. Our total working hours is 35 per week, and on average, a foreign teacher will teach 15 to 20 hours per week in the classroom. During the interview, we always advise the job applicants to use FIFTEEN per week (60 per month) as a reasonable number of the teaching hour when they estimate their total income. Foreign teachers who receive good job evaluations can request for more teaching hours, if they choose to. We also want to emphasize that the variable (teaching hour payment) is only about 20% of your total income, and the major portion of your income (base salary and housing allowance) will be a fixed number. In addition, for our school's development and for the teachers' own professional development, we of course expect teachers to spend reasonable amount of hours in the classroom to teach. We don't want to make teachers overwork or underwork. We hope that our teachers will make significant and constructive contribution to our school, and at the same time will have the time and opportunities to learn, to grow and to enjoy China.

3. Location
The majority of Best Learning branches are in Beijing and we have branches in other cities too. It's true that most of our foreign teachers are working at our branches in Beijing, but all applicants are aware of where they are going before they accept the job offer since location information will be addressed during the interview. In very rare occasion we may ask an employee if he/she can reconsider his/her location preference when we have unexpected staff shortage in a certain city, but that communication will be conducted before we send the job offer. When we interview applicants, we always ask their location preference and try our best to send teachers to the location where they want to go since the employee's satisfaction to the working environment and living condition is important for us.

4. Teachers
We indeed had the unfortunate occasions that we had to end our contract with certain employees due to reasons such as inappropriate behaviors, frequent absence of work without a notice and unreasonably poor job performance. When issues happen, we always try to talk with the employee first to see if we can fix the problem by collaborating together. As a large education institution which is hiring hundreds of foreign employees, harsh messages and tough decisions are hard to avoid. However, in general, 99% of our foreign employees have good employment relationship with us and our contract renewal rate is among the highest in the English Education industry in China. We have many teachers who signed up a second year or even third year contract with us.

5. Physical appearance
Best Learning hires foreign employees regardless of their race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, political stance and so forth. What significantly matter are the applicant's language capability (we require native proficiency), teaching skills, personality (since most of the students are young kids, we prefer teachers who bring a lot of energy and fun to the classroom), communication skills and professionalism.

This post was written by the official representative of Best Learning English on June 03, 2014.