1. TBI Dago                    Mid 2010

2. TBI Fatmawati           Mid 2010

3. TBI Sudirman            Early 2011

4.TBI Kuningan              Late 2011

5. TBI Riau                     Early 2012, later reverted to Luke Preece’s crony, Scott

In April 2012, when Ratna took over from Scott Martin, Luke Preece’s disgraced crony, the Indonesianization of school management was complete at TBI group schools. (Group schools are those which are those directly under the control of USG, also known as UniSadhuGuna.) For the first time ever, there was not one expat manager at a group-owned TBI school. This was a complete and drastic reversal from the situation of a just a short time before. As late as early 2010, all of their group-owned schools had expat managers. Why had things changed so much?

INDONESIANIZING TBI

Unlike their competitors, who still employ some expat school managers, TBI (The British Instiute) has undertaken to aggressively remove non-Indonesian managers, and there is now only 1 from 17 surviving at the school manager level- the best friend of Luke Preece, the corrupt Aussie who is the right hand man of the TBI Director. As late as early 2010, all of TBI’s five group schools- those listed in the table above- had expat managers. Now not one of them does. The dates in the second column show the point at which they switched from expat to Indonesian school managers.

In a period of two years between April 2010 and April 2012, every single expat school manager was removed from their positions. These five schools, with an approximate total enrollment of 3600 students, had over half of the TBI student enrollments during this period. In early 2010 they were 100% managed by an expat school managers, and now they are managed by locals in 16 out of 17 cases. This was a sudden and dramatic change, but bizarrely, at no point has it ever been explained, justified or even mentioned by Head Office to TBI teachers. TBI has even seemed reluctant to admit that the transfer of power had occurred. We received comments at some points denying that any such policy of ‘Indonesianizing’ school management existed, while it is plain as daylight. (See the above table).

Incredible as it may seem to TBI competitors, this shift was never formally acknowledged by TBI. Instead, they have vilified and attacked the sitting school managers and blamed it all on them. This ruthless campaign of vilification has claimed high-achieving school managers at times. The former school manager of TBI Kuningan, C******, had boosted enrolments to a record high of 675 paid students just at the moment he was removed. This was a 35% increase on a year before. Similarly (more on this tomorrow) the same campaign claimed the head of an Australian RD, who was TBI’s most successful franchise school manager, with six hundred students enrolled at TBI Bogor. Rather than admitting this change of policy, Luke Preece, Ashley Platts and Mariam Kartikatresni at Head Office have conspired to vilify and defame their own managers and claim that they all deserved to be sacked or ‘removed’.

DENYING THE BLEEDING OBVIOUS

To the authors of this blog, it is symptomatic of the arrogance and deceit of Luke, Ashley and Mariam that rather than admit TBI’s new policy and risk offending TBI expat teachers, they have chosen to conduct a cowardly smear campaign against people who had achieved great things in their schools and somehow infer that these ‘forced out’ school managers deserved it. Luke Preece, in particular, went around inventing all sorts of horrible things that former managers were supposed to have done, such as “refusing to have teacher Mark B. return to Jakarta“. Once we contacted Mark B. himself he confirmed that he himself had requested to move to Bandung and Luke’s story that this manager had blocked it was a total fabrication. Such lies had then been used to tar the name of Luke Preece’s rivals, and assurances were made that TBI was better off without expat managers.

But we ask people to look at the table above and think of this simple, undeniable fact. 100% expat management in April 2010, and 100% Indonesian management by April 2012 at the five biggest TBI schools. We ask any objective person to evaluate whether this shows like ‘a coincdence’ or ‘an orchestrated policy change’. The answer is obvious. This raises the question: who got rid of all the expat managers? The answer is hardly surprising: their bosses.

Luke Preece, Ashley Platts and Mariam Kartikatresni attacked, undermined, slandered and finally fired every single expat manager in TBI group schools between 2010 and 2012. This was an orchestrated plan to take over the company, which has succeeded. But fortunately there is a silver lining. The uproar caused by their outrageous deceit has now encouraged other TBI victims, such as the teachers of TBI Bekasi and Riau to come forward, and TBI’s carefully protected mask of respectability has fallen off.

The only expats remaining. Martin and Preece have colluded to remove all other expats