All alike.

Shane English School (SES) is a chain of schools operating in Asia. The school originally started in Japan and came about after an English teacher, Shane Lipscombe found he had too many private students and thus set up a school to deal with them all.

Since then it has joined with the Saxoncourt and operates primarily in Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and China. The group is also known as Shane Global and Shane English Schools Japan where they have more than 200 schools.

In China the first was opened in 2001 in Shanghai as part of the Saxoncourt group. Since then a further 9 SES schools have opened with a number of others opening as franchises. As in most countries where SES operates, the franchises are well supported by the group.

It originally promoted itself as a British English enterprise although in recent years teachers have been recruited also from America and elsewhere.

Amongst teachers although there are quite a few stories of problems the schools although they do tend to have a reasonably good reputation as far as salaries, honouring contracts and suchlike. However, as most of the schools are run as franchises conditions do vary considerably with some schools being accused of making teachers work long hours and providing little support whilst others are the complete opposite.

• Some SES will ask teachers to sign a contract which includes a fine for breaking the contract between 800 – 3,000 USD; this was on a monthly salary of 10,000 CNY (1,500 USD, 1,042 EUR, 939 GBP).