An anonymous former teacher at Kaplan Pathways lays out what it’s like to work under a precarious contract and in the absence of supportive managers.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. This is exactly why the TEFL Worker’s Union is organising at Kaplan. We all deserve stable hours permanent contract and a predictable working life. If you want to join us in fighting for that, drop us an email at [email protected].
I joined Kaplan in September 2019. I started as a 3 month sessional like many others did. A few of us remained there for over a year from the batch of tutors that started with me. Initially, I was working there a couple of hours a week as a tutor for one of the Modules they offered me.
The salary per hour was not bad and I liked the job as a side gig so that I could focus on finishing my PhD. The module I was assigned to was a 10-week course that the sessionals produced from a 20 week-long course.
I was given the 20 week-long course material and I was asked to condense it to 10 weeks, without any guidance on the content and with a platform that had no activities whatsoever. I was paid for 4 hours a week, but I was effectively working 8 (4 hours of writing material, uploading quizzes and marking material). I was initially given over 5 students, but then, 3 weeks into the module, I was given 10, 5 weeks into the module there were 15 students enrolled. They exploited the “flipped-learning” technique to the degree where I was teaching the content of week 1 to five students, and the content of week 5 to the rest of the class that joined earlier. I am not going to lie and say I expressed concern, quite the opposite, I liked the opportunity this represented.
I’ve got amazing feedback from my managers and my students. They then renewed my contract for another six months. I was given a decent amount of hours for a part-time that compensated for the extra work. I was assigned to two more modules, but I was not given material for it. I had to produce most of the material for my module because I was given a book to teach in 20 weeks. Kaplan did not produce material for everything, and it was not always clear how deep we were supposed to go.
I continued getting excellent feedback from both my students and my managers. In addition, the directive told me that sometimes Kaplan opened up permanent positions and I could apply for them.
When the pandemic hit, I was one of the teachers in my area that did not quit. Before the pandemic, each college in Kaplan was independent, Liverpool did their own thing, London did their own. This obviously did not work, as it meant that our workload increased threefold – we needed to produce new material, we needed to produce new assessments, and we needed to produce new exams. They attempted to centralise this but to the expense of using sessional tutors as the main productive force. Sessionals will have it as part of their job to produce materials. The sessionals with the best feedback were used as if we were permanent.
However, in 2020 we did not have as many students enrolling for the summer term as expected, and many dropped. As a result, Kaplan had two intakes: winter and summer. They then added the spring term, which started in March. However, because most of the workforce was now a sessional, The company could not hire us for the months of July and August. This meant that the March term needed to end in July, along with the term that started in the winter and the term that started in the spring. This obviously only works if the sessionals with the best student feedback are now working over 40 hours a week, but claiming half of that.
But due to the low student intake, they became more flexible: First, students would be allowed to enrol anytime after the term started, which meant extra “catch up sessions”. Then, students would not “be allowed to fail”, so we had to have more “revision sessions” for the late enrollments. Finally, they added an April term that started in April but needed to end by June.
This meant Kaplan was offering the same course (a 20 week-long course) in three modalities: normal (20 weeks plus holidays), intensive (20 weeks without many holidays), super-intensive (15 weeks without any holidays), and a flash course (10 weeks, no holidays and no extra time). This obviously means digesting the 20 week-long courses and producing several newer courses. They pretended we just had to adjust the same course and deliver it in less time. Still, we effectively ended up producing material for different cohorts and coordinating different cohorts as if they were the same course. Furthermore, we had to do admin of many new students. We needed to write a summary of our class at the end of each class to allow others to take over if someone was fired or quit.
I stayed for so long for several reasons: 1) I needed the job during the pandemic, but I couldn’t publish any of my PhD chapters during that time, 2) I had a good work ethic regarding my students, 3) I was promised I could become a permanent teacher and this would allow me to renew my visa with a contract.
The latter never happened and my visa expired. I tried to apply for jobs as a postdoc, but they all required me to have both, teaching experience and papers. The teaching experience at Kaplan, as a sessional, is not having the same weight as a permanent one. And the lack of publications has put me in a very precarious position as a researcher. I got no benefit out of this, being paid 30 quid per hour is not worth it without the stability.