Smith's School of English in Japan

[Fitz]

Well, I've been watching this thread and others on the topic of Smiths School of English Japan for over a year.

I live in Kansai, and have my own school where I teach English to kids.

Prior to that, I looked and enquired to the franchise school systems that exist in the area. Namely Smiths, Modern, and out of curiosity Shanes and Chocolate English. I wanted to check if there was any worth (of course in my opinion only) in buying from an established school franchise system.

Smiths was obviously the biggest and best set-up. I was taken by Mark to a number of schools to have a look at the system.

Modern was a little smaller, but based on the same system, including pricing.

Shanes isn't as simple, and is owned by Saxon-Court which is a large, international company.

Chocolate English is a 10,000yen 'franchise system' owned by David Norton and has a Cafe Franchising system.

The good, bad and ugly of all these companies is written on the blogs by various people. It's advisable to read to filter your information before you buy anything.

The incident with Smiths was very interesting. After 15,000USD initially advertised as his 'offering price' he dropped it to 5,000USD within 1hour of negotiation.

After I compared that, with the fact that there is 100's of pages written by ex-customers on the internet after only 10yrs of business it started to smell ever stranger.

Then he told me about his 'lay away' plan to put down payments of 10% and then pay the rest off with a 2 year contract.

Did he really do what other claim about him on this thread? Bearcat obviously has a lot of info on him.

[gfell]

This thread has been discussed at length and the quality of information / facts presented can no longer be held as the truth.

We are sorry to report that several posters in this thread have made multiple false statements against Smith's School of English. In a face to face meeting with Smith's School of English, indisputable documentary evidence spanning over 30 years of history has been provided. Those documents have never been made public until this meeting and prove emphatically that the biography of Mr Mark Smith as stated on the Smith's website is true in every detail. Education, business experience and family facts as stated on Smith's site are all true and correct. His biography may be seen at Smiths School of English Head Office Team.

On this site and others, false witness against Smith and his school has been made. It is now very clear these are merely lies and nothing more.

This persistent and scurrilous attack on Smith and his school by these few people on this website and others is unprecedented within the English teaching business. I trust we never see another as bad as this. The whole idea of an ESL Blacklist is to warn future teachers of scam schools and not to lower the reputation of an English school that tries hard to do the right thing.

I wish further to inform that although Smith has been angered and embarrassed by these attacks, he has conducted his dealings with AAC in an understanding, honourable and business like manner. In closing we wish to compliment Smith's School of English on the campaign to have the lies told about Smith's exposed, we regret that AAC was chosen as a platform for this attack on Smith.

This thread is now closed.

Thank you.