Interview

Shane Lipscombe

Shane Lipscombe is the founder and CEO of the Saxoncourt Group. The company operates under the brand of Shane English School, one of the major English conversation schools in Japan, and also operates schools in China, Taiwan, Poland and Vietnam. The group also includes the Shane Global Village schools in English speaking countries, a publishing company, a teacher training and recruitment organisation, and the children's examination board STYLE (Saxoncourt Tests for Young Learners of English).

Lipscombe was born in London, and graduated from Auckland University. After extensive travel around the world, he established the first Shane English School in Chiba, Japan in 1977. He did this interview by e-mail in May 2003.

ELT: I believe you first came to Japan at a pretty young age. What brought you here and what made you stay?
SL: I was 22 when I first came to Japan. I had been working as an economic forecaster at Thorn Lighting in London but that was the time of three-day weeks and the British economy was in a very sorry state. Being an economic forecaster, I realised that well, and thought a year or two in Hong Kong would be a nice alternative to working in London. My ticket to Hong Kong gave me stopovers in Seoul and Tokyo and when I got to Tokyo, I had just £50 in my wallet so thought I would stay for a while and try to improve my financial predicament.

Was teaching something you had wanted to do or was it just the easiest option open to an English-speaking foreigner in Japan?
Teaching was absolutely the last job that I had ever imagined myself doing! With an accounting and economics background, and a yearn for travel, teaching was something I had never even contemplated. I wouldn't have thought I would have had the patience to teach! I actually did a bit of modelling work when I first arrived, but teaching English was, by far, the stabler of the two careers.

It certainly wasn't difficult to get a job teaching English. The Monday edition of the Japan Times and a telephone call and I was given a job over the phone teaching a mixed group of 25 Marubeni employees starting that very same day. Some were complete beginners and some were fluent in English and there was no course book. I had had no training as a teacher so it was very much being thrown in at the deep end. The amazing thing was that I thoroughly enjoyed the situation!

Like many teachers, you supplemented your regular income with private students. What was it about you personally and professionally that made you take the next step, one that many teachers think about but never follow up on, and set up your own school?
Lots of things fell into place quickly for me in Japan. I got a big flat out in the back end of Funabashi, far enough away from the school where I was teaching. The school only had enough work for me four days of the week and didn't mind my supplementing income by teaching students privately in my kitchen. I was one of the few Caucasian foreigners living in Funabashi at that time and soon became well known in town. I was the foreigner on the bicycle distributing fliers late at night, the idiot who dressed up as Father Christmas and handed out balloons in front of the station and the fellow who put up handwritten posters in 'dodgy' Japanese in the local baker's, butcher's, chemist shop and so on. It wasn't long before I had a hundred students in my kitchen. Not all at once, of course. It was a big flat, but not that big. It seemed to make sense, therefore, to rent a building nearby and move the students there where I could offer them better facilities.

What steps were involved in setting up the school as a business?
This went in various stages over the next four years. I had never thought of myself as a long-termer in Japan but the longer I stayed, the more students I was able to gather and the more interesting the English language business became. It wasn't until my fifth year here that I decided to establish a company and try to make something of the potential and opportunities that there obviously were in Japan at that time.

Did you have other teachers working for you from the beginning?
My first school became successful quite quickly and I was soon approached by other small English school owners in Chiba who wanted me to manage their schools for them. This worked out very well as I could juggle various teachers between various schools. Over the years, I bought out most of those schools and this enabled the growth of Shane English Schools to expand rapidly.

What did you offer students at the beginning that was different from other schools or unique?
It was very much a cottage industry in those days. There were very few trained teachers and little regard for course content or the structure of lessons. Because it was difficult to find enough trained teachers in Japan, I started recruiting TEFL-trained teachers from the UK and hence the birth of Saxoncourt Recruitment. It wasn't long after that that we established Saxoncourt Teacher Training. Because there were few good children's texts on the market, we began to write and publish our own materials and hence the birth of Saxoncourt ELT.

At an early stage, we were involved in all aspects of the English language business, and that was the biggest difference from other schools. We were (and still are!) a fun-loving school, so we always placed importance on exciting events for our students (and our staff!). I think we did well at building a sense of community in the schools and between the schools.

What difficulties with setting up a business in Japan surprised you most?
Stubborn bureaucracy. The attitude of people at city halls and similar government offices was, on the whole, how to make life as difficult as possible. Obstacle after obstacle was put in my path and rarely did I find government offices to be helpful. Quite the contrary. This had the perverse result of my becoming more stubborn and more determined to be successful in Japan. Establishing schools in Taiwan, for example, was a much simpler exercise, where city halls and government offices went out of their way to be helpful.

Would you care to comment on the methods used by several of the big chain schools to pressure school managers to meet quotas or students to pay huge tuition fees in advance?
I could talk about this for hours. You've hit another button. Shane English School is also a business and our school managers also have targets to reach but I would hate to think that we ever pressure students to join. Our whole structure is different, anyway. We do not sell tickets and we do not ask students to pay one year up front: students can join very easily and very cheaply. We are confident that, on the whole, we are giving excellent lessons and value for money and that our students will continue after the initial three months, which is sometimes different from the attitude shown by our larger competitors where, in some cases, it is in their interests that students actually quit after only a few lessons.

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