Pros
- The main pro of the Educastream system is that the teacher selects from a list of available lessons (rather than opening slots and waiting to be booked) - There's a very wide range of ages, abilities and reasons for learning, so you can gain a lot of experience and it never gets boring - Ability to teach regular or one-off lessons - Because you are working 1-1, you have a great degree of flexibility to change lessons to work on the student's specific needs - Good place to start teaching. Materials are provided (but there are problems with this as stated below) - Technical support is usually very helpful
Cons
However... - I have never received any feedback or guidance about my teaching, and the probation period specified in the contract was ignored. While I presume this was because there were no problems with my teaching, it's not great practice for an education company. - It's very difficult to communicate with anyone. There is no contact between the students' "pedagogic advisers" and the students. E-mails are nearly always ignored. - Low pay at £9 an hour. The only incentive is a £2 bonus if a trial student signs up. £9 an hour was a decent rate a few years ago, but with minimum wage rising every year this is no longer very fair. They also only pay for 55 minutes if the student is late or doesn't show, so this is worse. - It seems as if the materials were created almost 10 years ago and have never been updated. Working with news articles from 2010 is a bit uninspiring, and it's hard to understand why the company don't seem interested in evolving and improving on their initial product. - Students often do a lot of "one off" lessons with different teachers, but don't practise much outside the lessons, meaning working with the set material quickly becomes too difficult