This review is going to be fairly lengthy, so if you don’t have much time, read the following paragraph:
I would strongly advise against working here based on my experience. My interactions with the owner were often difficult and at times felt unpredictable. There is a reason why they are constantly hiring, and many of the teachers I worked with were relatively new to the profession. If the owner takes a dislike to you, it can feel like your position is not very secure.
Review of the negatives:
I started working for Learning Tree towards the back end of 2025 as a teacher at one of the preschools. The cracks started to show immediately, and everyone working there seemed to be acutely aware of them. I heard the words “yep, that’s Learning Tree…” said in a negative manner more or less on repeat for the duration of my tenure. Let’s go over some of the problems.
Onboarding
Let’s start with onboarding (if you could even call it that). As a relatively new teacher, I expected at least a light level of guidance and training. Perhaps some monitored lessons with some feedback after? Some meetings about expectations and guidance with the curriculum? Nope. I was shoved into a class with another teacher who didn’t even bother to introduce themselves to me, and generally treated me like an obstacle in her classroom. I spent my entire first term sitting in the corner of a room watching the students practice for the Christmas play. Some days, the teacher who was supposed to be training me would simply not turn up for school. I wouldn’t be informed, I’d just be expected to carry the entire class on a moment’s notice. I informed management of the lack of guidance and teaching time I was receiving, only to be shot down with “yeah, it’s just that time of year” (please do try to remember that it is these very managers who made the decision to hire me at this stage in the year).
Same situation with the after-school ESL classes. I watched a grand total of two classes before being given a full class myself. Much of the information given to me by other teachers about what is acceptable to do in these after-school classes later turned out to be false. I’ll bring this up as a separate issue later.
Curricula, planning
All of the curricula and pre-set activities are placed on a Google Drive. Handy, right? Well, good luck finding anything. The drive is a tangled mess of old folders and dead ends made by various staff over years and years of incompetent file management. I cannot express in words how many times I searched something like “Grade 1 assessments” into the drive, only to be greeted by seven assessment folders, none of which contain anything of worth. Sometimes you’ll be looking for a certain calendar or curriculum, just to later be told you’re actually looking at an outdated one. Old folders and files are simply left to rot in perpetuity.
If you have been in teaching for a while, you might be aware of the concept of “magic time”. It refers to schools squeezing teachers by not factoring in time for planning, yet expecting fully planned and high-level lessons daily. Learning Tree might as well be Hogwarts, because they expect you (especially the elementary teachers) to produce hours upon hours of lessons daily from one hour of prep. This inevitably leads to a situation where teachers will plan extremely simplistic lessons, save for the time they have to perform in front of management or parents. The number of classes I’ve seen boiled down to “let’s colour, cut out, and stick something on construction paper and call it a craft” is scary. “Grow through challenge”; I suppose it is challenging for children to cut things for three hours every day.
Of the few senior staff that work there, one confided in me that he was effectively winging everything, and had no time to dedicate any meaningful thought to his classes.
Conditions
Most campuses don’t have a teacher’s room. Most campuses don’t have a dedicated staff toilet. You are expected to bring your own devices to work, and they will not refund you should they become damaged. I’ve had kids flicking paint over my MacBook. Learning Tree doesn’t cover your travel costs to and from school, they just tell you it’s “in your paycheck”, which is incredibly arbitrary, especially considering how awful the pay is. One projector is shared among four classrooms in the Tsukishima campus. Classroom resources are poor.
Atmosphere, environment
Some of the staff here are very helpful, nice and genuine people. However, there was often a noticeable sense of tension amongst staff when management was discussed. I will elaborate on why this is shortly, but in my short time at the school, I have seen a number of instances of staff being effectively humiliated by the owner. In one instance, an easily identifiable member of staff was targeted for using an online point-scoring website. The member of staff was completely unaware that this was against school rules, as school rules are rarely discussed. They exist somewhere, tangled between all the other folders on the Google Drive. Presumably, you’re just meant to know them telepathically, I guess? Instead of management putting their hands up and saying “we didn’t make our guidelines clear enough”, they sent an email out to parents shaming the teacher and describing their behaviour as a breach of trust. Long-term members of staff are acutely aware of how confusing the rules are, and they themselves do not have clear answers on what is okay and what is going to get you into trouble.
I have also been on the receiving end. The owner interrupted one of my lessons and got visibly angry at me in front of my students. Why? I was using a school-approved game (Kahoot) for the last ten minutes of a two-hour after-school class. It was directly related to the learning aims of the class. The owner did not attempt to understand the situation whatsoever. She never followed up or apologised for this outburst; conversely, it was I who had to seek her out and show her that nothing against school rules had occurred.
The kids are great, but there is absolutely no discipline process within the school. The owner does not believe in discipline. This makes for an extremely disorganised and rowdy environment. Students will constantly run down the hallways without consequence, despite it being against the rules. Kids will be openly rude to the assistant staff. Kids who need extra help with behavioural issues will be left on their own for large parts of the day. If you do try and discipline a student, you will likely be rebuked yourself. In one class I briefly attended, bullying was rife, and largely went unpunished. At the end of the day, Learning Tree is a business, and kids signing on to do another year is the goal. To that end, actually trying to care about the character of the children is out of the question.
Management and ownership
The big one. I found management difficult to work with, and communication was often unclear or challenging. There seemed to be a strong focus on credentials and external recognition. All meetings are aimed at getting a new certification or opening another school. No interest in teaching quality, no interest in improving conditions for existing workers. You will never see her in lessons, you will never see her leading by example. At times, the focus felt more on keeping up appearances. Oh, by the way, if you don’t have a teaching licence, she will pressure you into taking a loan with the school to do a bottom-of-the-barrel licencing course that isn’t even valid at some schools. I feel there are negative consequences for declining.
Upper management is basically a flock of yes-men and women who won’t dare to challenge anything she does.
Overall
I understand that there are many people in Japan who want to kickstart their learning career. I want to strongly advise you that this is not the place to do it.
There are certain things I cannot even discuss here due to how sensitive they are. Avoid.