You have to wonder what is going on at TBI Serpong. Since opening in 2009, it has seen a whole cast of teachers, managers and staff come and go with monotonous regularity. Luke Preece might think he can fool people by putting in comments about ‘a growing school’. And it may be adding students for all we know. But it is now on its fourth school manager in 3 years and at least its second one in 2012. That is clearly less an indication of growth than chaos. We know that at least one of the managers left in a disagreement over money. Another, the wife of a former CELTA trainer, was a victim of Mariam and her Mafia, who always smeared her name. Clearly things are proceeding with typical TBI Franchise school chaos out in Banten.

We have printed four separate job ads for 2012 placed for Native Speaker teachers. This list is by no means exhaustive. Clearly recruitment remains a weak spot for TBI. At the end of 2011 TBI Serpong was desperately short of Native Speakers and it has been advertising for them more and more in 2012. Indeed, rarely a month goes by when TBI Serpong isn’t advertising for fresh bules, who, for some reason, must be under 40!

Luke Preece is in charge of TBI recruitment. In 2010 and 2011 he got so a lot of people fired and amassed a huge range of jobs for himself, but he just can’t perform well in these new roles. He loves to blame DIKNAS for the chronicle Native Speaker shortage but Wall Street has boosted salaries to Rp 17.000.000 or so and now gets enough candidates. The crisis at TBI Serpong is largely self-made. Luke Preece has failed to recruit enough candidates and TBI generally has failed to boost salaries enough to attract people with the right degrees. Paying more to teachers would mean less money for Ning Anhar and her own kids.

But apart from Luke Preece and his increasing list of failures at Franchise schools, some blame does have to fall on the school owners. They have burned through a whole series of managers and failed to pay enough to get teachers with degrees ($1000 a month is upper-end EF salary). This points to problems with the owners. We note that the Marketing Officer role has also been advertised multiple times in 2012 at TBI Serpong. Clearly, people don’t want to stay working for the owners of TBI Serpong. No other TBI school is burning through staff so quickly. We sense that something is going very wrong there.