For all English teachers in Poland (who work for only $1000 a month)

I mean 5 90 min lessons, or 7 and a half hours teaching.

If anyone should go back to school, it's you. To learn how to be a bit more polite!!

same reason i do and i havent yet worked or lived in PL like you wroclaw ..

but jobs i have looked up offer approx high of 3,500.00Zł thats for the job of Pracownik do spraw osobowych on 40hrs and its a traineeship as well

lowest one seen is for 940zł a month

Nobody darling can teach 7.5 hours a day and keep quality!

Jonni,

While you are here.

What is the arrangement for ZUS ?

What is the minimum number of lessons one can expect ?


With smoke breaks, tea breaks, time to think... it's no problem. 7.5hrs straight... you have a point.

quote=johan123] Nobody darling can teach 7.5 hours a day and keep quality! [/quote]

Plenty do, believe me. Some do more.

I find that three lessons (4.5 hours) is quite enough when I have to cover for absent teachers, but remember that schools do feedback and if the quality is low the client will expect a teacher change pdq. And so much of the work is repetition anyway which cuts down preparation time.

When I was a teacher for target a few years ago (rip-off merchants frankly) they expected more than that.

And 4.5 hours per day will still bring 6375 pln before tax.

What about class preparation and marking! For short term periods it's possible! Any longer than a couple of months and quality would be affected!


ZUS?

Paid on an 'umowa o dzieło' meaning tax deducted at 19%, up to employee about ZUS. Many prefer to be self employed, a few pay zus themself or get private insurance, some wing it, especially if they plan to leave Poland, some prefer to pay NI in the UK to maintain pension rights etc.

No minimum number of lessons guaranteed - some teachers work at other schools (and constantly claim to get more elsewhere - probably true) - everything depends on timetabling and teacher availability.

In this school, a handful work full time and get the amount mentioned, most do lessons elsewhere plus their own privates.

I wouldn't fancy it myself, but some, especially ex-schoolteachers seem to take it in their stride.

I remember visiting the Berlitz staffroom (where the teachers were generally teaching to pay for travel and not really professionals) and some seemed so tired they were practically propping their eyes open with matchsticks.

But it is not teaching it's just chatting in English!

Jonni,

Thanks for the information.

Some clients want that, most expect more for their money. Even conversation classes need to have aims etc and have to be seen as aprt of a process with revision etc.

If they want to chat in English and be corrected they can get that anywhere.

Besides if money is the main motivator teaching's hardly the best profession !

My English teacher was great the lessons were always interesting! I really like the conversation classes that were well prepared

Remember there are over 300 private language schools in Warsaw. Even forgetting the suburban and kids-only ones, that's still a heck of a lot of competiotion, and in the in-company sector, the Poland only schools are selling against multinational ones with huge sales teams and gimmicks, who can discount prices for native speakers because they pay their Polish teachers so shamefully little. And have all sorts of tax scams, often involving ripping off non-EU native speakers

There has to be quality or the school won't survive. In the last 12 months,International House, Warsaw and the Warsaw City Centre franchise of English First went tits up. We took over the IH in-company work and got a couple of clients from EF (the rest were sold en masse to Empik).

It's a cuthroat business, and many large clients have been stung by using very cheap schools who pay peanuts and do indeed often get monkeys.


There's a real skill to doing that well and such lessons are rewarding for both student and teacher.


That's true.

But it's certainly still possible to earn a good wage. I interviewed a (very good) teacher who claimed to have got 75plm per 45 min in her last job. Even assuming she was trying to negotiate upwards therefore exagerrated a bit (she was!) she had certainly been doing well. And with the strength of the zloty, times are good right now.

If I were the owner of a language school I would focus on the Helen Doran market! It's really lucrative and very long term for the right school and the right product. In house company work will always be fickle

Take a kid at 5 and do the job well. You have the client for the next 10/12 years. Doron hasn't even got a good product and they are raking it in! I pay for my daughter to go because her friends go. There is little or no progress but she's happy and what more does a six year old want!

The Helen Doran type stuff does really well. One school I know closed it's normal classes and just does nursery school work.

The benefit of in-company work is that you don't need huge classroom space, an invoice is paid every month, usually on time, and the work is quite nice to do.

The schools who really make money are the ones in the suburbs who teach teenagers whose parents pay cash, very little of which is declared to the taxman.

A well known school with branches around the suburbs hires 'virgin' teachers straight from the UK tefl courses, gives them free accommodation in the owners portfolio of real estate and pays peanuts. The teachers don't stay long (and most don't plan to anyway) and he's raking it in.

You bet! This year I paid 950 for one year. The group has got eight kids and meets once a week for 45 minutes. It looks relatively cheap until you figure out how much the school's getting for the weekly meeting.

There are 30 weeks in a school year and one lesson a week: 950 divided by 30 times 8

and low and behold what do we have= 253zl per hour. That's better than any in company work. It's $100 an hour!

This looks pretty good - they need the real estate where the market is, but that's probably achievable. I wonder what they pay the teachers. A few of my clients send their kids to Helen Doran, and they describe it exactly as you have.

Even if they pay 60zl an hour. It's unreal! Little or no competition and none of the big boys even interested in the market! What's more kids buy books, CDs and bags at over inflated prices. What's the strangest thing is that I am happy because she goes to English. She can't say a word, but can count to ten and tell me a few animals or food related vocab.

I am in a totally different line of work but if I were you I would seriously think about competition for them. It is a licence to print money.

A year ago I placed an ad on Gumtree here in the UK asking for a Polish teacher... I got about six emails from Poland asking me to come over and teach English in return for free accommodation and food but no pay. No mention of any Polish lessons in return either...

I would be really careful about anything like that, whether from Poland or any other country. There have been too many horror stories. I remeber one young teacher vanishing without a trace somewhere round Gdańsk a few years ago.

Though most are respectable, there are a few small-town language schools that are run by real chancers and something like that advert should be avoided at all costs.

it's true-this income is POSSIBLE but you have to hussle for it. This generally means having two or three places of employment, plus the occasional translating or private teaching gig. Generally, however (because the workload of a typical teacher changes from month to month) you average about 3000-4000 after taxes if you work more or less full time, and your earning potential drops significantly during summer, when many English schools pay less per hour. Note: these are earnings in Warsaw, in other cities it may be a bit less.


ha! that's another story!..but many of the crappy ones don't last long...

Sometimes (especially at an entry level) the teacher whose native language is the same as that of the students may be a better choice.

I said 3000-4000 but 5000 is indeed very realistic for a so-called native-speaker during the school year if you take on enough hours

I am teaching in Warsaw mostly conversational English with advanced business students. The work is fine its just the housing that is the problem and the rate of inflation is really increasing rapidly. But I would say that if people are worried about the money than teaching may not be your cup of tea. If its money you want and also to teach than why not Kuwait, Korea, Japan, or someplace such as that. I enjoy my job because I go on site and teach and dont feel like a zombie in the same place at the same time every day (no offense to office workers or regular school teachers). I think teaching should not be about the money but more about the concept of being a teacher. I was a bike messenger for 12 years in different cities and countries. If I wanted money I would have been a stock broker or investment banker. Teaching is in a sense a service job. You give the people what they want. 90 percent of my classes are about global warming or other relevant worldly topics and the students improve their english and get to express their opinions. Of course I am all for higher wages for teachers. Corporate wages went up 11 percent in the past month. These are my students. Should I ask for more money from the school?

On average (depending on holidays and canceled classes etc.) I earn a little over 5000pln per month after taxes. Decent schools pay good money for good teachers.

Anything less than 60 pln per 60 min is not worth my time (this is about $20 per hour after taxes).

I earned 35 pln per 60 min my first year in Poland which is simply silly!!!

I don't have holiday pay, sick pay, or a pension plan. Summers are difficult without much pay.
I have to travel to companies and teach seven days a week with split shifts Monday-Friday. But I only work five hours every Saturday and two hours every Sunday evening.

The pay doesn't have to be terrible in Poland. The security/stability is an issue for me though.
And the teaching can be quite boring.

I stay here because I am in love with a Polish girl and overall quite happy.

She is a bank manager and earns around 15,000pln per month. She would never earn that much money in an English speaking country. So she prefers to stay in Poland. We plan to move to Krakow in July. I will continue to teach for a few more years and then maybe open business with her. At least that is the plan for now.

Oh this is of course in the city. I teach for Empik school in Katowice. The school is very professional, warm, and friendly (at least in Katowice).

Combining 2 jobs is good if u can do it. That's the way 2 rise above 5,000PLN after tax. 5,500PLN is normal enough then

I am a Pole, and a proficient English teacher. As a beginner, I only earn 800 PLN which is $400. That is my basic monthly wages, for public school teaching.

If it was not my duty, I'd quit or go to the provate sector.

Combining more than 2 jobs is better. When I stopped teaching I was doing three mornings and two afternoons a week for one school, one morning and one middle of the day for another, one afternoon and one middle of the day for another, one middle of the day at a company and two afternoons for private students. All the schools knew I worked for all the other schools which meant that I'd survive much better without them than they'd survive without me (there's a shortage of decent native speaker teachers in Warsaw), so none of them gave me any hassle at all but they all paid well, the lowest was the place which paid a zloty a minute (after tax), the best was 62zl per 45 minutes before tax.

That's in hand?