Newton International School - Lagoon - Qatar
Schools
The owners of this school do not seem to know how to treat its staff reasonably. There are numerous incidents of staff been treated unfairly when they have little defence near the end of working at the school. There was recently a dispute with staff over the salaries to be paid when leaving (both holiday pay and gratuity). Partly resolved by the threat of legal action. While you are in the middle of your contract, you will probably be paid, because they need your services in the future. Near the end of your contract you are more likely to be treated like something they would wish to scrape of their shoe. If you work here, be sure to have a good knowledge of Qatari labour law and/or the services of a good solicitor. My knowledge of Qatari labour law actually made very little difference as there was little time to take any legal action against the school. This is seemingly a deliberate tactic to only make staff truly aware of the detriments when it is too late to take action. The school seems to take pride in giving you as little payment as they can get away with and seemingly expects to make savings due to staff not having the ability to object.
The Secondary students (that’s what I can comment on) here are generally very nice, but are often frustrated by the lack of adequate resources at classroom level. The students have a common complaint that the resources are not adequate to their learning, especially in relation to the fees that they pay. I think that they are well behaved in consideration of this, but I imagine that there will be a decline next year. Many students are leaving to get places at other schools, and will only return if they are unsuccessful. If resourcing is not improved, the school will very likely sink and behaviour with it. Departmental budgets are not in place and generally all developments are micro-managed by the owners (who do not have a back ground in the profession).
There are some very good teachers at the school with some very positive student teacher relations, but this is very transient. The poor treatment of staff means that staff retention is generally poor and it is not certain that there will be a full complement of good quality teachers.
If you are considering teaching here and/or sending your children here, be very careful to consider the quality of education that they will receive. If you are a single teacher, you may want to take the risk if you have no better options, but keep looking for other jobs.
The school buildings are generally very nice.
UK curriculum, NC EW, IGCSE, A-level.
Check out the Qatar living forum for comments, but note the dates of the comments - as they go back a long time and may no longer be relevant. My comments are about the Lagoon campus which is one of four Newton schools under the same ownership.
Please read my add: http://www.qatarliving.com/node/15211226
The question of whether NIS are run like a business is a strange one. There is certainly a clear profit motive driving the schools, but the problem is that this is very much about short term profit and not building the business and profit in the medium to longer term.
The business will build when it is able to attract customers and retain them. The students generally feel that the resourcing here is poor and many wish to find a better option for schooling.
A better business model (and btw, a better educational model) is to resource appropriately to build customer satisfaction and therefore demand. An important part of this is to improve the retention of quality staff. Treating staff fairly can have a real effect on building the business. I am not sure that the owners see this.
Confronting the bosses decisions frontally, may have grave consequences. There are many cases where there has been appauling treatment of people who have worked well and in good faith. Confronting the issues may only make this worse. I am not sure that that discussing this causes demoralisation, I think it is probably quite the opposite. It may be a multi-cultural environment but I hope you are not saying that I should respect the right of others to treat people badly. I understand the cultural context and how this might affect my judgement of what is right or wrong, but there are limits to such cultural relativism. Sometimes wrong is wrong in a more universal sense. What helps in this judgement is that many others feel the same about this school
"covering up" what is wrong. Wrong is wrong, period. Anyone who wished to question the boss' decision should do it frontally, not at the back. It just causes demoralization to others. Remember that it is a multi-cultured environment and each has it own virtues to respect.
Each of the schools has an independant management and there are differences, but the ownership is the same and stories of the poor treatment of staff seem to come from all schools. Some the schools seem better than others and NSB Al Waab has a better reputation. The EYFS and Primary sections of Lagoon seem fine also.
Bullying in the student population happens in most schools. I do not think that it is dealt with any worse at NIS.
There are lots of good teachers at Lagoon, but I think that recruitment has been an issue. Many good teachers know of the poor reputation of staff treatment and don't take a job here. I agree that it would be better that newer teachers had more home experience, but there is a recession in the UK and jobs hunting can be difficult. Lagoon also has such a distribution of staffing because of the pay and conditions that it offers. There is also a big problem with staff retention because of the overall way the school operates.
The current principal is a lady of NZ origin. I think that she is good but struggles with micro-management from above. The limitation of responsibilty is very difficult to define for two reasons: (1) in the context of micro-management (2) some people have difficulty taking responsibility for things that go wrong.
of a certain NAtinalities at NIS LAgoon is very evident in bullying different nationality. And that what pisses the Owner. The administrator of NIS LAgoon is an Arab lady but the Principal is a UK lady I think. The limitation of responsibility of each should be defined clearly as running a big school like this is really hard.
Wrong thing is wrong, period, but if one need to protect a fellow countryman, have some decency not to offend the small workers. But again, maybe they think they are great teachers and administrators.
Don't get me wrong, they are cute, gorgeous and beautiful people BUT 1, 2 or 3-years experienced? What do you expect from these teachers. Dealing with highly multi-cultured studentry? They should take more experience in their own backyards first before coming here.
Interesting. Yes, to what extent are these experiences true across the board for the other Newton Schools? Seems to be quite a few complaints about these schools, however. I wonder how much of this is just the usual problems any new school faces vs. genuine problems with how the schools operate. They are, after all, part of the for-profit model, which means they operate like a business, and so it is careful game of taking as much as possible for profit without ruining the school.
Good teacher, how true it is that the each of the four campuses have their own administration/management?
NBS Al Waab had good comments and some friends are having good experiences with their kids, but honestly I did not hear anything positive about NIS West Bay in which two of my friends had to withdraw their kids due to lack of supervision and also because they were getting beat up by other kids and unfortunately teachers including school management showed their incompetence while addressing these issues.