The following was written by English Online teacher working at the British Council (BC) and outlines the difficulties faced by online teachers. While the BC maintain that their online teachers are employed by the Impellam group, it’s the position of the union that the British Council is ultimately responsible for the teachers’ working conditions. As our membership at the BC continues to grow, we encourage teachers there to join us in holding the British Council to account.
A number of teachers, including myself, were recruited from 2020 onwards to teach for the British Council English Online via recruitment agencies; I and others based in the UK are ‘employed’ by Flexy, who are part of the Impellam group operating globally.
It is something of a complex arrangement as whilst my contact with Impellam is connected to pay and contract arrangements, the British Council manages all teaching, teaching quality, training and the allocation of teaching work. I am employed by Flexy but my employment is managed by the British Council.
A number of teachers were, like me, in a stable arrangement where we taught fixed hours each week on a rolling basis. These hours were regular and unchanged until 15 February 2023 when the full cohort of teachers were advised via a Teams post there would be ‘changes to timetabling’. This was to ‘simplify the upload process’; the sole, somewhat puzzling, reason provided was that it had been suddenly decided it was too challenging to deal with scheduling teaching when the clocks change in March and October.
It seems that rather than choose to organise themselves sufficiently to work with changes to the clocks twice a year, the management instead decided it was a better option to nix teachers’ regular, guaranteed hours. It is difficult to try to add this up as an explanation, frankly.
Class uploads happen at some point within a three hour window that is announced a short time before. All teaching staff in the UK, Australia, India, Canada and Mexico have to scramble to try and secure some hours for future weeks. Because of an increase in the number of teachers onboarded recently and a seeming dip in the number of students, you have to drop everything to assign classes as soon as they are uploaded as otherwise you are (and teachers frequently are) left with no classes to assign themselves. Sometimes all teaching hours for an upcoming week are taken within minutes.
I have waited up until 2 am after teaching a 7 hour day to assign my classes and then had to get up and teach another 7 hour day afterwards. It is not sustainable and nor is it good management practice to demand your teaching staff do this week in, week out.
What has made these massive changes even more challenging for teachers has been the lack of communication from the management; not just concerning the reason for the change, but a lack of response to valid concerns of teachers about the availability of hours, the scheduling of them and if and when the situation is going to stabilise.
Are the British Council and Flexy operating with UK employment law? It appears so. They are paying us in the UK above the minimum wage; for some of our duties this is all they opt to pay us, which is questionable of a leading, charitable organisation with their resources. Are they acting as responsible and ethical employers? That is a question that only they are equipped to answer. It would be interesting to hear their response.
Please do reach out to TEFL Workers Union if you are affected or agree with the issues outlined. We want to make these issues heard by those who need to be listening and acted upon. You can reach a rep at [email protected]