OPGRADES GLOBAL: SCAMS AND BOGUS LECTURERS
I posted a short piece on project management on linkedin a month or so ago, but I did not name the company referenced nor did I go into detail. I certainly did not itemise what actually occurred there and why I resigned-in part because of my own involvement in obtaining accreditation for the group. This, and the previous article (Project Management: When Organisational Resistance Causes Projects to Fail), refers to Opgrades Global and UKcct, a sister company, and tells of scams, other illegal activities, bogus unqualified lecturers/trainers and an assortment of unscrupulous activities.
I was uncertain whether to write this article. After I left I considered the matter done and dusted and that the group’s organisational flaws and inadequate personnel would not allow them to prosper. Three things changed my mind. One: meeting others who had worked there two years before and who had the same experiences and complaints regarding this group: two: stories I heard that corroborated my experience: three: after leaving the college (ran would be a better term) they are now stalking me on linkedin and sending me abusive emails. The time is right now for J’accuse.
How it started:
I received a call from Michael, the manager of the above, several months ago. I can only give his first name as no one seems to know his surname, nor where he lives, his background, or country of birth. It may be that ‘Michael’ is not actually his name either. I have heard from one source that his first name might be Zander. Another ex-employee suggests Michael Zander Zander. Who knows? When asked, he refuses to provide any information on the above. I do know that he and his caucus have been working together for at least 2 years. My first meeting with Michael occurred in a hotel near Putney station. He spent most of the time applauding my academic credentials, stating how well known and respected I was. I assumed he had read my papers. As I needed work at the time I allowed him to waffle on singing my praises and lauding, if excessively, my achievements. According to him, I was the greatest academic doctor in the land. He spoke to me about his two existing lecturers, Gary and Stephen, who he claimed were even greater academics than me-this was certainly an extraordinary exaggeration of their abilities.
My remit, according to Michael, was to write a book begun by Stephen Clark, one of the lecturers, whom he appeared to consider slothful, and to write academic courses and achieve accreditation.
When I started working at the company I discovered that they principally subsisted on Paediatric Life-Saving courses, charging £50 each and ESOL courses but made thousands more on nannying, Project Management and business courses. All are in-house, and except for the ESOL courses, valueless to the students. For example, Project Management exams are conducted by PMP, the UK Government and Axelos for Prince 2 or Edexcel Pearson. Opgrades runs through the PMP book without an end exam, charging students hundreds of pounds.
To obtain a regular supply of customers, all from other countries, they advertise routinely in Metro and Evening Standard. Their paediatric and IELTS courses are delivered by Gary Vann (not his real name), from Armenia. He claims to have escaped from Armenia due to a political scandal he was involved in, but I have no idea if this is true. At other times he alluded to corruption charges while working for the Armenian national airline. The IELTS courses did not seem to follow the accepted processes. The ESOL courses are delivered by Stephen. The teaching is done in a grubby building in Putney.
The responses to the constant advertising are handled by a sales team on the ground floor. The sales team is supervised by Marcela, a rude, excessively aggressive, unbalanced and shouty woman from the Czech Republic. Usually the salesroom is a busy hive of aggression, screaming and shouting. It is not conducive to study and learning. Marcela is rude to everyone, staff and students alike. As I later discovered, Marcela lives in one of the offices and has done so for approximately two years. In the office-cum-bedroom the accounts are kept. No one sees the accounts except for Marcela. My colleague, sent there by the owner, a successful Mortgage Broker, never found where the financial records are kept and therefore what goes to the owner and what does not. Clearly, Marcela and Michael may not keep records. I witnessed VAT being established for Opgrades Global two months ago even though it has been running for at least two years.
According to several of my colleagues at Opgrade and UKcct, the schools act as recruitment companies offering nannying and apprenticeship jobs that don’t exist. Once they arrive at the school the sales team tell the hopeful applicants, always short/long term stay foreigners with no knowledge of how English education works, that before they can get one of the jobs they have on their register they must do courses in English and Paediatric First Aid. Once they have done these courses they’ll be sold, pressured by the sales people, further courses. The victims often hand over thousands of pounds. At the end of each course the students are provided with certificates-made on the spot, in-house and totally worthless. Opgrades Global also provides apprenticeships, advertised on their website, which are also a scam.
Lecturers:
I mentioned the two lecturers, Gary and Stephen Clark, in my previous article demonstrating that neither are qualified. Here, I will go into detail.
I know little about Gary Vann, except for the information Stephen gave me above. He is a very good teacher but is most certainly not an academic, as Michael continuously claims, constantly alluding to him ludicrously as a high-level academic with a superb intellect. Such a description testifies more to Michael’s ignorance of academia. After an acquaintance of 2 months, I could find no evidence of an academic background. His inability to actually write documents rather than copy and paste points in the opposite direction. Although he claims to have studied law at Harvard, his knowledge of law, certainly British law, is non-existent. If he requires a contract or legal document he goes to google and finds one there. When I was engaged in obtaining the first accreditation, he copied and pasted a document (on equalities if I remember) taken from a corporate website that had nothing to do with education or colleges. He employs cut and paste for everything. Stephen does too, indicating a similar lack of academic ability.
As my primary remit was to acquire accreditation, I needed evidence for both Gary and Stephen’s qualifications. Gary was difficult to research as I did not know his real name. I spent ages searching for evidence of Stephen’s qualifications but could find nothing except his name on a site for ESOL teachers. There was no mention there of higher qualifications, which seemed odd for someone advertising for students. In general conversation, he seemed commonplace mistaking facts for knowledge. He mentioned, on occasion, where he’d worked before. Many of these colleges I had worked at too and still knew some of the staff there. I checked Stephen’s credentials with them, and they confirmed that, to their understanding, he had only a Celta or TEFL, qualifications for teaching English to foreign students. This concerned me as if neither Gary nor Stephen had genuine qualifications it would make acquiring accreditation difficult.
Child Care Book:
Michael, see above, asked me to continue writing a book on Childcare begun by Stephen. I did not like taking over someone else’s work, but Michael gave the orders. The book seemed adequate and I had not then begun to doubt Stephen’s credentials. I added to the book and straightened out some of the phrases. After I gave in my notice, I agreed to complete the book. While finishing it off it occurred to me that given Stephen’s history it might consist of copy and paste, therefore unpublishable, and putting it through a plagiarism search engine I discovered to my horror that it was. He had taken up to 40% from internet sites. This meant I had to do feverish rewrites.
Gaining accreditation:
Once I succeeded in acquiring accreditation from Highfield, I then had to send in everyone’s degree certificates before Highfield would allow any of us to teach their courses. Consequently, I requested Gary and Stephen to provide their certificates. I received a tentative response from Gary but nothing from Stephen. This confirmed my fears that both were unqualified. Worse, I realised belatedly that Michael intended the courses to go through Marcela in the sales room. In other words, they were to be sold off like sweets to anyone willing to give the money demanded. In the Paediatric First Aid classes were many students who were unable to speak English, but somehow they passed. You pays your money, as they say. The academic staff were it seemed to have no control over who was taught the courses, how, over what duration, nor how they would be assessed.
It was then I had a crisis of conscience. I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d realised the kind of people I was on the cusp of legitimising. I called a meeting to which Michael was invited. In the meeting I confronted Michael over what he intended to do with the accredited courses I was acquiring, pointing out that they should only be controlled by academics. I insisted on an academic room where essays, exam papers and students files could be kept and that these must not be kept in the sales office. I suggested room 46 where Marcela slept. Michael angrily agreed. I further pointed out that it was illegal for Marcela to use the office for living purposes, and her staying there could destroy all my good work. We, after the meeting, argued for hours.
Michael expects his staff to agree with him, not to argue with him.
Over the following weeks, Marcela did not leave her room and I realised I’d been lied to. I was then told another room was to be allocated, but that too was a lie. Although Michael offered me a five month contract I resigned. I realised my reputation was at risk and staying longer would be intolerable. An added reason for my resignation was that Michael intended to give the completed book to Stephen and Gary, or, as I called them, copy and paste 1 and copy and paste 2, to critique. A shameful decision I thought.
As Michael cannot handle rejection, that is people leaving the company, he became paranoid. I was asked to sign a document declaring I would not speak to anyone about what I had seen at the college. I actually had no intention at the time of doing so but signed it anyway. I was nevertheless anxious about the money owed to me as Michael had a habit of not paying people, finding any excuse to avoid doing so. A few days later one of my students told me that Gary had taken her into a room and attempted to force her into writing complaints about me. She had refused, declaring that I was an excellent teacher.
Stephen:
Although I have not covered everything that went on there as I expect some of my ex-colleagues from Opgrades Global to add their experiences, Stephen is worth dwelling on. Although claiming high-level qualifications he clearly has only a Celta, pretending nevertheless to be a professor, or his understanding of one. Often he merely produced laughter as few really believed his claims. Usually, he made things up, which could be annoying and disconcerting. I saw him by the Thames riffing on mudlarking as if it wasn’t commonplace knowledge and he’d recently discovered it. He was picking up coins left by the tide and declared them Roman, coined during the reigns of ancient Emperors that he named. An amateur detectorist wandered over and carefully explained that he was wrong and who the Emperors portrayed on the coins were. Next time he spoke about the coins, he pulled another two, entirely different, names out of the air.
He claimed expertise in everything. If you spotted a motor bike he declared he had been a motorbike champion; if you noted a particular bird, he was an expert in birds; I once told him I’d had two businesses but neither had done well, whereby he retorted by saying he’d had three businesses that had done marvellously. If that had been the case, I wondered why he was working at the school for below minimum wage. He told my son, visiting the centre, that he’d run an insect house in a zoo and had two llamas in his back garden. Added to these lies/fantasies, he’d swung the corpse of the last Tasmanian Tiger by the tail, mistaking exactly where the stuffed body was, and exclaimed that he was an expert in ancient history and palaeontology. He subsequently lectured me on the Chinese bringing bronze to the Late Bronze Age Near East down the Silk Road. Bronze is an alloy made up of tin and copper, and tin in the ancient world was found in present day Afghanistan, Anatolia and Cornwall. Also, the Silk Road was established during or after the reign of Alexander the Great some thousand years after. He also confidently exclaimed that the Hittites had animal headed gods (they didn’t) and nobody knew why (well, because they didn’t). I threw technical terms at him from palaeontology and they flew over his head with the swiftness of a missile. Like Michael/Zander/or whatever, Stephen seems a Walter Mitty type.
Breaking laws:
1) Pays well below minimum wage. Staff are required to work for ten hours each day without an assigned break. Their pay is usually below £5.00 an hour.
2) Michael/Zander/or whatever often does not pay staff when they leave. Usually staff, unless they take matter to court, lose at least £1000.
3) Scamming foreign long/short stay visitors out of thousands of pounds by offering jobs or apprenticeships that do not exist.
4) Providing unaccredited, worthless courses to achieve the above.
5) Advertising skilled, qualified lecturers when this is far from the case.
6) Breaking every employment law so far devised by the government.
7) Unscrupulous financial dealings.
8) His greatest crime? Along with his minions, Gary and Stephen, he is giving British education a bad name.
