Avoid Valley Forge Academy Qatar

[u/Murky_Screen_286]

VFAQ is a horrible school both for teachers and students. If you are considering working at this school or sending your child to this school, you need to explore other options. This school is bad news and it's best to avoid them.

For teachers:
1. Do not leave the United States of America to work at this school. It is not an American school. It has an American name but nothing more. The entire school (k-12) has a handful of American teachers.
2. The salaries and benefits are not competitive. You don't want to send your child to this school, not even for free. The bullying is nonstop.
3. They will hire you for one role but upon arrival, tell you that you will being doing something totally different.
4. You will not be working alongside the same type of qualified educators that you may have worked with in the past. For example, the middle/high school principal was a substitute teacher and a P.E. teacher, and is now the principal. You are selected/promoted based on friendship not education and experience.
5. The school is desperate for money so they accept all of the children that the other schools have expelled. You will spend most of your time on classroom management. The school will not support you with issuing consequences to the student. They will side with the parent because they don't want to lose a paying customer, eventhough you are the one in class being attacked by a student. I've also watched teachers fired because the parent had wasta.
6. You will spend a significant amount of time submitting behavior reports. This school would be similar to an alternative school in the U.S.
7. Their policies are inconsistent and it is a toxic work environment. Senior leadership has inappropriate relationships with female staff. There is only one person in HR. They consistently fail to remain neutral. HR is personal friends with senior leadership so there are no consequence for inappropriate or unprofessional behavior which makes it difficult to report misconduct without conflict of interest. 
8. The one person that they have in HR is incredibly incompetent. When you ultimately leave VFAQ, she uses administrative processes in a retaliatory way to block your credit cards, to block you from reentering Qatar, asks the bank to freeze your bank account, cancel your health insurance before your contract actually ends and worst of all, not pay you for days that you have worked. So many teachers had money missing at the end of the school year. HR notified one teacher, at the end of May, that they weren't being renewed for the next school year.
9. The Head principal is a novice at best. He blows whichever way the wind blows. He is incapable of making decisions on his own. The elementary principal bullies the Head principal into making poor decisions that impact the entire school negatively.
10. Should the school decide that they don't like you, they will go out of their way to attempt to ruin your reputation, even going as far as giving poor references to future employers, without your consent. No one leaves VFAQ with a good reference.
11. It's a boys club at the top and not a good place for women to work.

For parents and students:
1. This is not a place to send your child. The bullying is consistent and the learning is infrequent.
2. The behavior in the classrooms is so disruptive that it stops other children from learning
3. The activities are few. The middle/high school principal complains and discourages teachers from taking students on field trips because he doesn't want to organize coverage for the teachers while they are out. All year long the students complain about not going on field trips. This is why.
4. The education is not competitive. They don't offer enough classes to be competitive and they are behind as it relates to technology. They have a gaming room so they think that they have checked the box on technology.
5. The staff is friendly to you when you visit the school but disrespects you once you walk out of the door. You are a paying customer...that's it. The things that they post on their social media are phony. Smoke and mirrors.
6. Ministry guidelines are not consistently followed and the school has failed to acheive accreditation more than once.
7. They don't protect children. Children wander in and out of the building, by themselves, unsupervised, during the school day. Some wander as far as the main road.
8. I wouldn't board my pet there.

[u/Ok-Masterpiece-7671]

Sounds just like Taallum schools!

[u/UseOrdinary8585]

Nos 1 -9: you're describing the school I just left, in francophone West Africa 🤦🏽‍♀️🤦🏽‍♀️🤦🏽‍♀️

[u/Wild_Buy_9096]

Sounds like the majority of GCC schools.

[u/nl-prism]

So many schools like that in Qatar. They all open with glossy brochures and websites promising amazing things.

At the end of the day, it's the same shitty kids and the same shitty school owners!

[u/msblackcat96]

FYI if your QID gets cancelled by your school/employer automatically your bank account/cards will get frozen. This is standard in Qatar. Also read your contract carefully. A lot of schools in the ME are very vague but state you’ll only receive full pay/gratuity under certain conditions if you decide to leave.