The Language Business

British Council - a recap

I can’t expect all the readers of this blog to know its background, so here’s a quick recap.

1. In addition to numerous benefits and privileges, closed contracts and state pension arrangements, the British Council gets a daily (i.e. 365) subvention from the taxpayer which is a substantial multiple of my annual turnover. That means competition from them with me, or with any other genuine enterprise (whether at home or abroad), can never be fair.

2. So I shouldn’t have gone into competition with them? It was of course the British Council who chose to marshal its state-endowed advantages and use them to go into direct competition with me. In 2001 my enterprise was already 13 years old, and the company's position as market leader was established.

3. In that year the British Council had a cooperative agreement (1998-2003) with my company. This included a contractual obligation to support our publications with their “best endeavours”. At this time we were meeting the full cost, and risk, of supplying the British Council with printed guides and CDs (we supplied altogether about 1 million products worldwide), and our offline database was installed on all British Council computers worldwide.

4. Over and above the points in (1), but in order further to ensure that the playing field would now be tilted at a sharper angle in their favour, the British Council

• signed a competing contract in which it had a financial interest 
• obtained my signature on a waiver without revealing this key fact
• appointed the same managers, with whom I was obliged to liaise for the purposes of our cooperative agreement, to oversee the development of a direct competitor to our product
• seriously misrepresented their own contractual arrangements to the public in general, and specifically and deliberately to my client base in particular. Well OK, they lied.

5. When it was clear (in 2004) that I would not shut up (and had written to Charles Clarke, at that time Secretary of State for Education), the British Council (actually the Director-General David Green) unilaterally and secretly instigated an “investigation” which involved internal contact with only the managers referred to in (4) above. It then used this non-investigation as a basis for rejecting any further enquiry by any person, with the formula that there was “no basis for (my) claims”.

6. In 2005 when I made a related FoI enquiry to the British Council concerning whether there had been any variations or amendments to the British Council’s 2001 contract with (£100 company) Education Websites Ltd, I was told there were none. In fact the contract had been switched to Sheffield Data Services Ltd (which strikes me as a pretty significant amendment, and at the very least a reason for not saying no variation or amendment). In March 2005 Education Websites Ltd swapped names with a new company called Remone Ltd and an application was made to Companies House to have Remone Ltd (i.e. the original British Council contractor from 2001) struck from the record. Now why would they do that?

7. Because what took place in 2004 was a deliberate stitchup and in no sense an investigation, my quest for truth and justice has necessarily continued. Truth and justice remain concepts which the British Council struggles with, however, and in a later blog we shall look at why, and what needs to be done about it.

ICEF Berlin November 2009

Were you at the ICEF Workshop in Berlin two weeks ago? 1740 professionals working in international education were, and this video captures some of them at work.

British Council's IELTS Service upgraded

We’ve had occasion to blog about IELTS before, and have had many reports of concerns about examination security, and even of the legal status of IELTS examiners in certain countries. There is a serious problem of audit. But today we learn that not only does the British Council audit itself (or not – our correspondent uncovered a centre which had not been audited at all in 15 years), but the British Council’s own employees are now alleged to be taking money to sit the exam for others. The report from the Punjab will make unhappy reading for the organisation, and probably won’t go down too well in Canberra and Cambridge.

Thus we have a true one-stop solution from the British Council. Knock on the right door and the organisation can help you take the exam, can help you pass the exam, can help you find a place in a university (as long as that university pays them), and then help you get a visa to go to Britain. They probably do airline tickets as well. All it takes is money. And happily there are no outside busybodies / inspectors / committees / professionals checking up on them who might spoil the party.

 

Unless of course someone gets caught (British Council employees getting caught taking IELTS? And nobody noticed?)

 

The police chief in the Punjab says “There is a possibility of involvement of more British Council employees in this racket”. More than a possibility I’d say. 

EDIT: More in today's Telegraph

 

Education UK and UCAS searches compared

The Education UK site uses UCAS data under licence, so you would expect the search results to be much the same, if not exactly the same. But they're not. Even if you think it is more suitable for a non-native speaker of English to type, say, "Biological science" rather than click on it, the fact is that the student who does succeed in getting the spelling right etc. may have a rocky time. The serious question is why does anybody believe that the search system on Education UK, which has been this way for almost 8 years, is better in any regard for overseas students? It works sort of, for some searches, so it's better than the EFL or summer course searches. But let's not kid ourselves that this crappy service is helping international student recruitment.

Education UK and Independent Schools

A short video which illustrates the utterly inadequate service offered by the British Council to overseas students and parents in respect of independent schools, particular when compared with the service offered entirely free of charge by the Independent Schools Council.

Education UK Summer Courses

This is just another example of how Education UK has failed to serve the interests of either international students or UK schools. Depressing, but that is what we're stuck with.

EFL Course Search on Education UK

This is a video I made in April this year in order to make the British Council aware of the fact that their service for English language institutions in the UK on the one hand, and for international students on the other, is in need of attention because it doesn't work. You can get a bigger screen format on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Czc6VtFn-I 

Another school video site

The demand for videos with school presentations looks very strong, and I am quite happy to have a site that focuses on UK schools, boarding and language schools, at UK school videos. But I'm already involved with videos outside the UK, such as the French and Italian ones on this blog, so I've put up a "sister" site called International school videos, which you can see here. Instead of searching by UK region, you choose a country (yes, I know, it needs more countries...). When the site went up I was contacted almost immediately by a school in Malta who wanted their video included, and I hope to have that in place very soon.

You can see where our principal site visitors are from at any one time by clicking here. Just wait for the three maps to load.
 

Et maintenant...

Que vais-je faire? Well the answer is that I have made a (sort of) video for a school in France. Since I haven't actually visited the school, I suppose I am now in agency country which is a bit of a challenge to my self-image. But there it is. It was fun making this, and they are very nice people (I do know that much). 2 minutes only.

Channel 4 News - my walk-on role

The news item is about the failure of Brits to learn other languages (witness the response of the natives of Basildon in the piece when addressed in French!). My contribution comes in at 3.00 and lasts for 25 seconds.

Seeing is believing?

I’m guessing, but I think that is one reason why videos of schools are popular. Delving into somebody’s web site can be difficult in another language (when did you last look for something on a Chinese site? or even a German one?) but seeing pupils/students in a school, their staff and their buildings in action, even if you don’t understand everything they say, can create a strong impression.

And if the thesis is correct, and there are people who want to make video a part of their review process, it is not efficient for them to search through non-standardised and usually monoglot school sites to see if there’s a video there. That is the thinking behind our new site UK school videos. If the viewer is interested by the video, there is a simple link to the client web site, so the site is in effect a video portal for boarding schools and language schools.

It’s still very early days but we have excellent results from Yahoo and Google, and some of the videos on the site have already been watched there several hundred times. So far approximately 10% of views result in clicks through to the school site.

Fathers, Sons and Ghosts

For the second time this year I have had the pleasure of reading a book written by someone I count as a friend. Knowing the author of a book, particularly when the book is very personal, adds an extra dimension because you can seek and find the person you know in the telling, and enjoy finding your perceptions nuanced and enriched. Nic Ridley’s book “Godfrey’s Ghost – from father to son” is a great deal more, however, than a book to be read by his friends. At one level it is a book for a single reader, his son Christopher. At another it is a book for us all. At one level it is a biography of man who made his career as a playwright and actor, but who also fought in two world wars and who saw both triumph and disaster, personally and financially. At another it is an exploration of the father-son relationship, as well as a relentless self-examination, and even a philosophical odyssey.

Nic Ridley’s father was Arnold Ridley, celebrated as a young man as author of “The Ghost Train”, and in his old age and in the 25 years since his death as Private Godfrey in the hugely successful series “Dad’s Army”. For his son Christopher, Nic wants to separate the man from the actor, and more specifically from the benign, acquiescent, bumbling, geriatric part of Godfrey, which to this day he can see on his television screen almost any week of the year. In telling his father’s story, and in his quest for the true depiction of his character, Nic also turns the microscope quite ruthlessly on himself, not sparing the anger, the selfishness, or the harshness, while not obscuring his tenderness, his deep sense of loyalty towards, and love of, his family, which are also woven into his quest. This book is a fascinating construct, an engrossing story, a moving and intimate examination of family, and will be an enduring record of a man who treated “those two impostors just the same”. And it is quite beautifully written. In this respect, as in so many others, the author is his father’s son.

*****************************************************************************************

I hope Nic won’t mind if I mention here my own father. After he died in 1985, I found a handwritten poem in his desk which I add below because it touches on a part of the relationship between fathers and sons.

At Louth

Visiting here by chance
It comes back to me that forty years ago
We came here, my father and I.
He told me much as we looked
At the spire and the altar
But I was listening to other voices.
We enjoyed our day but, driving back
Over the wolds in that evening of late March,
He must have felt a little sad
The sadness of all fathers,
And I a little impatient,
The impatience of all sons
To be back at their own affairs.
Now, if I could meet him on these steps,
With his smile of greeting,
I could understand so easily what he was getting at
And, two old men,
We should go into the church together.

Miscellany

I've now had this blog for well over four years, and even when I started the photo I had of myself was quite old, and so I have replaced it with one which is more current. You could call it a sort of Dorian Gray moment. I had a bash today at doing another "commercial", and here it is for anybody interested. 1'47" only. Update: edited version now a tad longer at 2'12" with news of our latest web site.

MAN U meets EFL

Manchester United Soccer Schools combined with EFL at Clifton College, Bristol. Neat.

Pollyanna International*

It’s their birthday, and in case you wondered what pearls of wisdom the British Council have been gestating over the past 75 years, I can tell you that you’ll find them on their NEW corporate homepage. And here’s the leading thought:

We believe the world is a more stable place when there is more trust and understanding between its peoples.

Blimey. There are perhaps a few people in Broadmoor who take the view that more understanding and trust between “its peoples” (us) make the world more unstable. In the real world, however, the rest of us can see that this statement from the self-styled cultural relations experts is simply a stupefying platitude from an organisation that must be running out of ideas faster than it is running out of money.

If we apply the logic of this core belief, the organisation itself is likely be a tad less stable today than it used to be, as internal trust and understanding would seem to be on the wane. Hundreds of jobs are to go and, to the dismay of the unions, it would seem that many of these are to be exported to India. Does it matter?

Many thousands of people in the UK have had their jobs exported already, and so we should not weep too many tears for people just because they work for the British Council. But the move does highlight once again the extraordinary anomaly of this organisation, which

a) is directly subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of over half a million pounds per day
b) is awarded contracts by a number of government departments which are not open to any other organisation, thus providing further financial underpinning from the public purse
c) is able to use the enormous benefits of a taxpayer-funded international network of offices, and the use of diplomatic premises, to win exclusive commercial contracts for itself overseas
d) enjoys diplomatic status and privileges overseas, even as it goes about seeking financial advantage for itself
e) enjoys charitable status at home, despite its clear governmental purpose and its role as the servant of the FCO
f) uses a wholly owned limited company to win corporate sponsorship contracts from international companies which provide it with their private sector cash in order to be able to profit from the organisation’s taxpayer funded diplomatic status and network
g) has employees who enjoy early retirement and participation in the taxpayer funded civil service pension scheme
h) despite its massive public subsidies is at liberty to “compete” with private sector enterprises at home and abroad which have no public subsidy and are obliged to pay tax, cover all their own overheads, make their own way, fund their own pensions etc. Was ever a playing field less even?

As noted above, the plan now is to outsource some of the organisation’s overhead to India. To put that another way, the British taxpayer is to pay for its public servants to be employed in India rather than in the UK. As I believe Indians would agree if the situation were reversed, when British taxpayers’ money is used to employ people in other countries for no other reason than that a publicly funded organisation, despite its massive subsidies and privileges and special status and unique business opportunities and government contracts, unlike the rest of us, cannot organise its affairs satisfactorily at home, a line has been crossed. The British Council has no right to use our money in this way and should be stopped.

* The Pollyanna principle or Pollyannaism describes the tendency for people to agree with positive statements describing themselves.

The Bogus College Problem

The following is from the recently published report of the parliamentary Home Affairs Committee on Bogus Colleges.

It is difficult to ascertain a precise figure for the number of bogus colleges in existence. One method of forming an estimate is to look at the discrepancy between educational establishments listed on the previous Register of Education Providers, which provided the only means of obtaining a student visa until March 2009, and those listed on the register of sponsors under the points based immigration system, which has replaced the Register of Education Providers and requires more stringent checks of educational establishments’ credentials. There are around 2,200 colleges which were on the Register of Education Providers but are not on the register of sponsors. Whilst failure to transfer from the Register of Providers to the register of sponsors does not automatically mean a college is “bogus”, we suspect that a significant proportion of these colleges are not legitimate.

That report has no doubt set the Home Office alarm bells ringing. What is a “significant proportion” of 2200? Are we really awash with bogus colleges?  How many do they mean? 400? 800? 1200?

If you compare the DIUS register of education providers with the UKBA register of sponsors you will quickly discover that you are comparing apples with oranges. To start with, the DIUS register is ten times as big as the UKBA register, and the applicable criteria for inclusion are obviously different.

· To deal first with that headline claim, there are really not 2200 colleges (or “academies”) listed on the DIUS register which are not on the UKBA register, and the number is absurd. Is it possible that the committee has based this statement on a frequency count of the word “college”? I hope not. City of Wolverhampton College is listed with multiple entries – here 6, one for each campus – as are many others eg. Glan Hafren, North West London, Birmingham, Bristol, Westminster, Sunderland, Plymouth, Cornwall etc. Perhaps one of the committee could be deputed to make an accurate manual count over the parliamentary holiday.
· The treatment of the registers by institutions is different. For example, those of us in the world of EFL know that the group that includes Basil Paterson College has about 20 schools in it. They are all listed individually on the DIUS register while on the UKBA register they are grouped together under the single entry of The Gins Alliance. There are others.
· Sifting through the DIUS register is a pretty major undertaking since it contains prep schools, Public Schools, industrial training outfits, prisons, local Age Concern centres, local authorities, equestrian centres, business links and much else besides. A handful of these are potential “sponsors” under the new system, but only a handful. And they are not bogus.

My research is based on the first 3300 in the DIUS register corresponding (approximately) to the first 375 on the UKBA register, representing between a fifth and a quarter of all institutions listed in each case. Where there was a college with no obvious explanation I made some preliminary research. As a result of that research I have (privately) listed about 20 institutions that are clearly open for business that I would query, of which I would expect that some have a proper explanation for what they are doing (e.g. that they do not wish to sponsor visa nationals as their market is UK based or EU based).

Let me be clear. I think it highly likely that there are some bad eggs among those colleges I have looked at. I do not deny that this problem of dodgy/bogus/criminal colleges exists, and like everybody else I deplore their existence and want to see them closed down now (and indeed I don’t begin to understand the delay). But I do say that the number of such institutions nationwide is, based on my comparison of the two registers, likely to be no more than 100, that the analysis of the Home Affairs Committee is sloppy, and that the proposed response – the need for UKBA stormtroopers to pounce unannounced on the premises of our many excellent and thoroughly respectable institutions – is disproportionate and inappropriate. It is also, like so many recent developments, likely to be damaging for the UK’s international education market.

Norfolk enchants

A great village occasion.

Incidents and Coincidence

I met John Swales for the first time in April 1975. Working at the University of Kuwait, and for better or worse identified at short notice as one who might be suited to such an expedition, I undertook a mission lasting just a few days to research ESP programmes at universities in the region, where in short order I took in visits to Cairo, Khartoum, Beirut, Tehran and Tabriz. Only in Beirut (which was, although I didn’t know it, about to explode into civil war within hours of my visit) did I succeed in getting a normal hotel room, and my Khartoum arrangements for the first night, after a late arrival and driving round the city were such that I had no sleep at all. I made my first and only call of the day to the English Language Servicing Unit in Khartoum University, carrying my suitcase, and there met John Swales who, bless him, promptly offered to put me up. I knew John’s name as author of “Writing Scientific English”, and his work at the ELSU was already renowned in the region. My visit also coincided happily with the publication of the first edition of the ESPMENA Bulletin – a journal whose every edition we were to devour avidly in the Engineering College at Kuwait University where I worked. [If you have a moment find Angele Tadros’ reference listed about 5th in the Google results – go to para 3 of the “Scholarships” section]. It gave me particular pleasure that in 1978 John was invited to Kuwait as visiting professor.

John has just published “Incidents in an Educational Life” with the University of Michigan Press (links below). All of us have an Odyssey, and those of us who have made a career in English language are, by virtue of both its essence and its international context, especially able to relate to and enjoy the experiences of others who have also taken this slightly eccentric path. John’s book is about “incidents”, many of which have that element of chance in them that we oldies will recognise, and the reader can follow how these various elements come together to shape the backdrop of the career of an outstanding academic. It is an engrossing tale of academic gestation and personal development. Note that my use of “academic” here has no sense of dryness; John has always been creative, innovative, funny, good company, and not least a “Mensch” who stands up for friends and colleagues putting loyalty and principle ahead of himself. He has managed to combine those qualities with scholarship and research and academic achievement in a way which is all his own.

The book comes up with name after name of people I have had the pleasure of meeting, and I feared that if I started naming them I might never stop. But I hope John will forgive me if I mention just one of them. Van Milne visited Libya and met John in 1968 and encouraged him to turn some materials he had written into a book. Col. Gaddafi’s revolution (September 1st 1969) provided John with the opportunity to do exactly that and John’s excellent, pioneering, seminal textbook "Writing Scientific English" was published in 1971. It happened that in 1972 I went to Tripoli and in 1973 was put in charge of the English language programme in the Engineering Faculty, the very place where John had developed the material for WSE. In 1975 the same Van Milne came to Kuwait and encouraged me to turn some materials I had written into a book. My little book was never in the same league as John’s, but it got into the same section of the catalogue and rode for a while on its coattails. In 1978 I left Kuwait and joined Van at Nelson as commissioning editor. Van – a man of many parts, RAF, DFC, publisher and friend of Kwame Nkrumah, and perfect gentleman – was, like John, one of those people of whom it can be truly said that knowing them has been a privilege.

Buy John’s book. If you know him the exhortation is redundant. If you do not, you will certainly enjoy the story, you will certainly laugh out loud, you will certainly get to know, and to like, the man who wrote it. And, like me, you will surely want to recommend it to others.

Incidents in an Educational Life by John M. Swales. The University of Michigan Press 2009.

Amazon link for quick purchase here.  

How "Accreditation" increases share for unregulated schools

I heard the Minister for Culture and Tourism Barbara Follett give a short speech yesterday at the BETA parliamentary reception, and I believe that she is comfortable in the job and, as one with a great deal of international experience, likely to be an asset to the UK tourism industry. But since her address was to the “British Educational Travel Association” – an association with a name that makes it plain what it stands for – I hope she will address one of the most absurd anomalies created by our non-joined-up government affecting the English language teaching business in the UK. Which is this:

Visitors to Britain who arrive on tourist visas are welcome, while they are here, to take lessons in cookery, in shooting, in riding, in ballroom dancing, skateboarding or yoga. But not to take English language lessons. Students with tourist visas who walk in off the street and into schools with a sign saying “Accredited by the British Council” in their windows are, very politely I am sure, advised that enrolling in the school will be very simple if they will just go back to Japan or Russia or the Yemen and re-apply from there. After that all they will need to do is take a simple internal flight from Minsk to Moscow and, after a few hours queuing at the British consulate for some ritual humiliation including interrogation and finger-printing, they will then be free to fly to Britain again and take classes at their “sponsoring” school. These potential students, no doubt dazed and incredulous that they can choose freely from, and are welcome in, Britain’s theatres, museums, pubs and clubs, hotels and massage parlours, but not – surely uniquely anywhere in the world - given official access to the language of the country they are in, are simply turned away. The reason for this is because if yours is a school that has undergone “accreditation”, you may not accept them. If you do you face losing your licence as a sponsor, and – quite probably - going out of business.

Fortunately for these potential students there are still plenty of perfectly legal unregulated schools which are unencumbered by this bureaucratic nonsense, where students can – in the same way as other visitors from the EU for example - walk in off the street and take English lessons. There are also plenty of people teaching English from their homes (in much the same way as a number of currently regulated schools once started) and who are teaching such students perfectly legally and no doubt with great success. Of course it is possible that, fearing a raid from the authorities, such teachers have the wherewithal to pretend that what was going on was not educational but simply, say, a “Formula One” sado-masochistic session between consenting adults. The authorities would then, unless they found a hidden copy of Headway or Murphy’s Grammar underneath the leather and the whips, be obliged to leave empty handed because such activity is of course perfectly in order on a tourist visa.

How did we ever allow such fatheads to control the English language teaching industry in this country?

Ms Follett – over to you.

Accreditation goes downhill

I was principal of a British Council accredited school in Cambridge for three years, and I was an inspector in the accreditation scheme for five years. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I have to say that the scheme is rather obviously not what it was, and “Your guarantee of quality”, as the British Council would have it, has certainly lost its currency. All the items below have, following a quick trawl this morning, been taken from the web sites of schools which are accredited by the British Council. I invite you to consider their professionalism. My comments precede each item.

1. No, I don’t know the Callan Method. But I do know bullshit when I see it. And Accreditation UK?

We use The Callan Method; Learn English in 1/4 of the time by speaking and listening 70% more than in a normal school.

2. I’d like to see this one properly tested. Will Accreditation UK back up this guarantee?

A written guarantee of success for the Cambridge exams

3. Of course I don’t mind what British Council logo schools choose to use. Maybe the British Council wants us all to use this one?

 

4. Bargain corner.

 
5. Look carefully at this. Would you buy a used qualification from these people? Does Accreditation UK actually know about TEFL qualifications? (and spelling?)

- an approved TEFL qualification, i.e Cambridge CELTA or DELTA; Trinity TESL (TESOL); TOEFL.

Each one of these qualifications includes the pre-requisit lesson observation quota.

6. Academic point perhaps, but this outfit is not accredited with the BAC. Just muddled.

We are fully accredited with the British Accreditation Council. We are also members of English UK.

7. More than one issue here. If schools are nowadays free to publish extracts from their reports, are the inspectors these days really writing this sort of garbage?

Our Accreditation With The British Council

The British council conducted a two day inspection of our school in July 2008 and this is just some of what they had to say...

Regarding the welfare and student services

...students benefit from the caring support given by the school's staff, who responds quickly to their needs. The residential accommodation is of good standard with excellent staff student ratios...the social programme is extensive, innovative, and entirely suitable to the student body...students are offered a varied experience, which encourages team spirit, yet takes the individual into account. The welfare provision is an area of strength...

Regarding Student induction and help

...the school has a thorough and well designed student induction programme. All staff are expected to view student welfare as a shared responsibility and this is the case in practice, as students clearly perceive staff to be helpful and approachable...

Regarding our student care

...the level of care offered to students during their stay is well described and entirely accurate. Students are given 24 hour care and supervision by a dedicated and caring staff...

(and there's plenty more).

8. One for Sylvester Stallone?

We specialise in teaching English to foreign stud

9. Look carefully at this timetable, and see if you notice anything eccentric.  (It adds up to 15 hours btw so don’t waste time with a calculator).

 

And no, I’m not going to say where they all come from. I will leave that to the people who “guarantee quality”.