The Language Business

Letter from China

Nothing changes here IELTS-wise. Diplomatic Immunity reigns and many examiners have visas which don't permit work. They shovel out money to examiners for large exam sessions - some examiners can command over GBP 3000 a month - no tax, no commitments. Others not only test, but are also EOR personnel and Trainers. For them IELTS is a full-time job but, of course, they have no security. However, they seem to like it. A bunch of naive, lazy losers (I sound like Colonel Blimp).

On another tack, I feel that the BC does bugger all that could be considered effective to promote British Education in China. You might think that a key role for the BC would be to provide help and advice to parents and students, who seek an International Education in Britain, in a transition process from the Chinese education system to that of Britain. Their efforts are desultory and derisory. The reason why is because they can't see a profit in this direction. Parents and kids don't understand the transition and therefore can't see the need to reduce the risk in their investment in education overseas. This is what you might expect the BC to be cognisant of and be active in - a direction that would ensure success stories from a British education.

It seems to me that the BC is immoral. There seems to be no central guiding ethic related to purpose or "mission" apart from making bucks. I was critical of the org 35 years ago - still am. What a wasted reputation it has in mere survival. Lost dignity, and a blight on the UK's copybook.

The UK with its history and reputation for welcoming overseas students - whatever their ability - is being ruined by government, and the mere survival instinct of the slug that the BC is.

British Council targets Payband 8

The circular letters from the British Council “Chief Executive” have been signalling for some time that redundancies are on the way. And now all employees in Payband 8, just below senior management, have been invited “to apply for compensated early departure” (which in practice means 12th November).  And here’s the formula:

 “We have therefore agreed to offer the opportunity for a limited number of UK appointed staff at pay band 8 to apply to leave the organisation on Voluntary Exit terms under the Civil Service Compensation Scheme (CSCS)”.

Because the British Council is, despite its permanent efforts to obfuscate, an arm of government, it is a civil service scheme. Some people in senior management probably know who they want to get rid of in middle management(and vice versa, but that door is of course locked) but the “opportunity” has to be offered to everybody. In payband 8.  However “we will not be able to consider applications from all colleagues”. This is because any member of that payband with skills – commercial skills, project management, customer management, cultural relations expertise, specialist skills in English, Exams etc., or leadership skills – is unlikely to have their application accepted.

Think about that. If you have transferable skills (such as initiative) and want to get out of the British Council you should now clean out any favourable references you might have, dress sloppily, upset your line manager, fall asleep at your desk etc. But if you are one of those who scratch your head and wonder what “cultural relations” are, or is, and have only what we might call BC survival skills, the answer is simple: don’t apply, and everything will be OK.

This is not a great time to be made redundant, especially for assorted civil servants who may be as out of touch with the pressures of the real world as the British Council senior management. So I guess there won’t be many running for the exit. What the British Council certainly will succeed in doing is demotivating an entire stratum of its own management.

Heads up a*ses as per usual.

What links South West Surrey with Education UK?

Rather a lot it seems. There is some interesting forensic reporting here from “The Slog”, which we commend to all readers. With all parties involved on a protected inside track, Education UK was always a plaything of an incompetent Establishment cabale. There is, it would seem, virtually no room for free markets to operate in this key area of economic activity. The government should of course sort this out – but do we have a government that can look beyond the interests of their own club? Does such a thing even exist?

Cosy is as cosy does

If you haven’t read John Ward’s piece on Hunt and the British Council, try it. And the comments at the end provide quite a lot of entertainment too.  More will no doubt come when the Culture Secretary gets his turn with Lord Leveson.

I can’t (bear to) repeat here the whole sordid story going back to the saga of Study Choice, the double dealing, the public misrepresentation of the arrangements by the British Council, the secret contract switch, the attempt to bury the contracted company, the falsehood produced by the British Council in answer to a FoI enquiry, the devious activities that followed the initial failure of the site, and all that. The bottom line, as they say, is that companies controlled by Mr Hunt have held contracts to sell the British Council’s “Education UK” services since inception, and have therefore had a monopoly of the sales of this state-sponsored monopoly’s site. Nice work if you can get it.

And cosy (because he’s still got it).

But it’s also an absurd and embarrassing failure. If you go to the Education UK website and in the search box on the right choose Institutions and then Boarding Schools and leave the rest blank you will see that 1235 institutions are listed. Only 11 of them have paid for the British Council’s service (and at least two of them are not boarding schools anyway). Choose one of the 1224 others, and you get their phone number and postcode only. You also get a link which says “View all courses at this institution” but on every one of those 1224 links any user is told “No results”. How useless is that? And why on earth is the British Council allowed to serve this sector so badly? And even in the area where it claims world expertise and enjoys disproportionate power in the UK, English language teaching, only 107 of 499 institutions, or 21%, have been persuaded to part with any money. Because, of course, it is so effing useless. Which is one of many things the British Council has in common with government.

"Foreign Policy Stodges" in Eye report

In our piece 10 days ago we referred to the lazy MPs on the Foreign Affairs Select committee who so readily bought into the special pleading of the British Council. Well don’t miss the “Called to Ordure” article on page 8 of the latest edition of Private Eye. The parliamentary committee, as the article says, mainly consists of dyed in the wool FCO supporters who took evidence “from a narrow world of foreign policy veterans” – so naturally they want more of our money for overseas antics as, in the words of the article, “it would be horrendous if the British Council actually had to meet its bills from its language schools”.  The lazy, out of touch Westminster parasite club.

 “The only people not heard were the poor ruddy taxpayers”.

And so say all of us.

The British Council brings more shame on us

I commend Nick Cohen’s article to all readers – and some of the comments below it hit the bullseye as well.

The bottom line is of course that the British Council’s commercial ambitions in China are far more important than the defence of freedom of speech, or an ethical foreign policy, or the representation of any residual British values.

As Nick Cohen says: “If British publishing goes along with this grubby stitch-up, it will indeed dishonour not just its best traditions but the best traditions of this country, which we – silly, complacent people that we are – do too little to defend.”

British publishers will make their own minds up as to how China should be handled, and we British onlookers may or may not approve of the stance they take. Meanwhile, however, the British Council not only condones but actually sponsors this “grubby stitch-up” and does it in our name with our money. How long will it take before our lazy MPs get a grip?

British Council must not become an international language school

So says the Foreign Affairs Select committee in its annual report on the FCO published today. 

It is a typically sad bit of parliamentary fudge. There is the British Council “Chief Executive” urging his staff to go after the money, offering “staff awards” to the “entrepreneurial”, and sitting atop no less than 8 limited companies, while these flabby parliamentarians do nothing to rein the organisation in. When the committee warns that “an emphasis on commercial activity will detract from the British Council's primary purpose” its members appear to make no effort to think through the implications of what’s going on. The clear and explicit emphasis on making money long since detracted from the British Council’s alleged purpose, so much so indeed that most people, handing over their money worldwide, are unaware of what that purpose might be.  The organisation’s track record of muscling into operations where it has no expertise or staying power and then screwing it up is second to none. And it gets away with it because of its enormous privileges. It has made enemies at home and abroad precisely because it competes unfairly. Yes, it denies that, but for heaven’s sake what do you expect? Any organisation that has its overhead and pensions paid for, has guaranteed contracts with which to “earn” more money, and has a whacking great subsidy, cannot compete fairly and is unlikely to let go. What other organisation owning six overseas companies is mandatorily underpinned by the taxpayer?

The committee has lazily bought into the BC management’s mythological formula about £5 earned for every £1 invested, and missed the point about where all those £s come from. Even if the wretched organisation closed down today, we taxpayers would have to carry on “investing” in the organisation for decades to come. Just as we will have to for these same lazy MPs.  Nul points.

Beware of British Council "entrepreneurs"

The latest missive to the masses from the org’s “Chief Executive” continues the apparently inexorable move to purely financial motivation. Here’s a telling quote:

Finding new ways of being paid for our work will continue to be a focus for the 2012/13 financial year. And in this year’s soon-to-be-launched Staff Awards, we’re introducing a new special category recognising entrepreneurial work contributing to impact and income growth.

The British Council “Chief Executive” knows nothing about enterprise. His salary has always been fixed by his “grade” and paid for by the public, as will be his pension. That makes him entirely typical in his organisation, where the concept of enterprise boils down to using the enormous support of the public purse and diplomatic privilege to secure unfair advantage over genuine enterprise. By genuine enterprise I mean the sort that risks its own money, pays for its own overhead, and has nothing to fall back on but its own resources. The British Council “entrepreneur” meanwhile, wrapped in public sector cotton wool, knows that he or she will get brownie points (“staff awards”) for, in effect, stealing business from the less privileged, secure in the knowledge that they can count on Establishment support if for any reason the going gets rough.

Davidson, who is really more of a “Head Boy” than a chief executive was, like Kinnock and the previous Director-General, happy to tell parliament that there was an impenetrable firewall between money they were given by the taxpayer in the form of a grant, and other money (much of it from the taxpayer of course) which they “earned”. Meanwhile, as we saw last summer, he was also on record internally as supporting the integration of these supposedly firewall separated sources:

“There are concerns, and indeed confusion, around the extent to which we have to worry about accusations of unfair play when we seek to integrate our grant funded and FCR funded services”… “Martin’s view was that even if we did change the funding model, it would not stop accusations of unfair play (after all who will be looking at the minutiae of our accounts).These accusations likely to increase.”

One suspects that it is because the org is sensitive to such accusations that it has issued a “Factsheet” (even the name is a giveaway) headed “Our Commercial Activity” which trots out the traditional line about charitable objectives, separate accounting, more trust for your money etc.  It closes with the statement pictured above that

“By 2015 our commercial and contract work will account for over 80% of our turnover: this means we will earn more than £5 for every £1 of taxpayer funding we receive.”

Right, so if in 2015 they turn over, say, £1 billion, they “earn” £800 million (80%) and are subsidised to the tune of £200 million (20%). By my calculations they would, in that scenario, be able to claim that they “earn” only £4 for every £1 given – better take that £5 claim back to the Executive Board – one of them surely has an O level in maths. But of course that £1 they refer to is just the grant, and the claim makes no reference to closed government contracts, privileged access to overseas contracts, civil service pensions, diplomatic privilege, operating out of diplomatic premises etc. Or owning 8 limited companies. It’s a good example of how the organisation simply ignores the truth and propagates deceit.

The Chief Executive is of course himself the embodiment of the deception – banging on about the need for enterprise while being paid for out of the public purse. The simple fact is that publicly funded bodies cannot be entrepreneurial, they can only cheat. And this organisation is now actively encouraging its employees to find new ways of cheating and thus of making life difficult for genuine entrepreneurs. So if you are in any way involved with the organisation, watch out. The British Council wide boys can, and will, screw things up bigtime. It may not matter to them, but it might to you.

How the British Council doesn't manage change

The British Council has just put out the results of its latest staff survey which the management spins as showing “increased understanding of objectives” and “greater optimism about the British Council” and “your future”.

Almost everybody (among the 69% who took part) in the British Council (82% of participants) supports the headline contention that “change is necessary in bringing long term benefits to the British Council”. Replace the words “British Council” with anything else and it will be seen to be a rather unremarkable judgement. More tellingly perhaps 70% of staff reject the assertion that “Change is well managed in the British Council as a whole”. The other 30% are, one imagines, the managers themselves. And the results elsewhere, despite the efforts of the numerous managers, betray cynicism regarding BC management e.g. the contention that the organisation “is genuinely interested” in the wellbeing of its staff gets just 50% support (the use of the word “genuinely” is a bit of a giveaway perhaps). And only 36% - including all those managers given the job – support the contention that their UK department will deliver a successful long-term future for the British Council.

We have already seen “the kind of organisation we want to be” as articulated by the “Chief Executive” – i.e. one that siphons off the maximum from taxpayers as well as individuals – and it would appear that an astonishing 44% of British Council staff share that vision and believe their executive board can deliver it. But then two thirds of British Council staff evidently always believe the information they are given. Oh dear. Meanwhile we also learn that a majority of British Council staff do not support the contention that “It is safe to speak up on issues where you disagree with management without it damaging your career prospects”.  To put that another way, most British Council staff, whatever else they say, cannot speak freely.  Which is possibly why they say they believe what they are told.

An organisation – a “cultural relations” organisation that supposedly represents the UK ffs - where staff toe the line and keep their heads down and their mouths shut because they are frightened for their jobs cannot progress. An organisation that won’t look truth in the face cannot possibly manage change. And any management that believes staff in such a context are showing “greater optimism” about the British Council and their future is stuck in the position illustrated.

Students and Immigration: the British Council adds to the confusion

There was a moment a few weeks ago – it passed quite quickly – when I felt like reporting positively on the British Council’s apparent stand on international students. The government’s visa policy was, it reportedly said, harming the education sector – a line we have taken ourselves on this blog on a number of occasions. The organisation evidently did enough then to stir Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch, and Sir Andrew today berates the organisation for undermining government policy.

Let’s be clear. All of us in this country want clear and strictly enforced immigration controls, preferably backed by a system that takes the trouble to filter out the bogus, and logs visa holders out when they leave as well as in when they arrive (which really doesn’t seem too much to ask). And, meanwhile, even the government wants to see a healthy education sector. So how does the British Council respond to Migration Watch? Like this:

Dr Jo Beall, the British Council’s director of education and society, said: "The British Council completely backs the government's intention to attract genuine students who make a huge economic and academic contribution to Britain, so we feel obliged to point out when independent evidence suggests there's a risk that current policy may mean the UK loses out to our competitors.

"We want to help government combat that and universities to attract the brightest and best students and researchers".

The first paragraph passes muster even if we might jib at the reference to the government’s supposed intention. The second paragraph betrays the usual British Council gutlessness.

The health of the sector does not depend on “the brightest and best”. Of course we want them, but the brightest and best do not typically attend vocational colleges or the whole range of university preparation courses or lower ranking universities, institutions and programmes which are a vital part of our offer, and to which we should welcome international students in exactly the same way as to Oxford, UCL, Edinburgh etc. The UK policy on international education should not be elitist; it has never been before and it is a disgraceful thing to start now. An education in the UK means nothing if it does not mean bringing out the best in all and any students who have the desire and the means to come here for that purpose (“The Best You Can Be” remember, British Council, the slogan you spent so much of our money on?), and we should welcome as many as we can comfortably help. But the government’s line is, crudely, to classify students as immigrants, and so bring down their immigration figures by reducing the number of students, and meanwhile to discriminate against the private sector, a sector which includes many colleges with a long established and merited record of distinction nationally and internationally. And the government uses a rather sickening elitist formula – of wanting only “the brightest and best” – as a justification for their position. That the British Council should now echo the immigration minister’s formula, thereby backing away from support for the whole international education sector in the UK and ignoring the powerful economic, educational and even political benefits of a more open policy, is a betrayal of the sector. The British Council might like to try putting that policy on the doors of its schools overseas and seeing what happens. And why anyway should “the brightest and the best” cross half the world to come here if the government, and now the spineless British Council, adopts such an attitude?

“The kind of organisation we want to be"

But what kind is that?

Read this paragraph from the “Message from the Chief Executive” we looked at a few days ago:

At last month’s Management Board meeting we spent time thinking about the kind of organisation we want to be. One that focuses on raising the income we need to deliver our purpose, whether from individuals, organisations or from governments, rather than one which focuses on how to spend. We need to move away from an over-focus on perfect plans to a focus on rapid and effective decision making, flexible use of our resources and an emphasis on delivering with pace. This means much greater individual decision making rather than ever-expanding committees. This will inevitably take some time, but we’re focused on making it happen.

If you can bear to read that more than once – it is a little hard given the struggle the writer evidently has not only with logic but also with the English language (all that “focus” could make you go blind) – what is now explicit is that the British Council is above all a money-making organisation, maximising revenue from individuals, organisations and governments.  The dear leader is meanwhile looking for “rapid and effective decision making” and also “greater individual decision making” rather than the “ever-expanding committees” over which he evidently currently presides, a process  which will, he writes, “inevitably take some time” (so don’t expect any contractions just yet). It’s not exactly Churchillian. But setting aside the writer’s crude attempt at executive speak, which he evidently knows is something to do with “pace”, “focus” and of course “decision-making” (preferably the effective sort), the general move is clearly towards making more money.

The reason I returned to this epistle was because I realised today that I have been sleeping on the job. I have been glibly reporting here that the British Council has “a company”  - BC Trading International Ltd - which is a vehicle for sponsorship from international corporations. In fact the British Council has by now a clutch of companies, including two in the UK (there is also BC Holdings Ltd), one in the USA (two if you include IELTS Inc. in Delaware), two in India, two in Mexico and one in Hong Kong. And directors all over the place.  The Hong Kong company is called “BC English Services Trans-National Limited”, so that is one to watch if you happen to be a part of British Council ELT operations. The British Council has made a loan of £2.3 million to that company as well as a loan of £1 million to BC Holdings Ltd. At this stage the British Council reportedly owns 100% of the shares in these companies, one of which “BCT Events and Promotions India Private Ltd” is not consolidated into the accounts as it is “not material to the group”. As I’m sure you would agree.

The British Council is already a “charity” to which HM The Queen lends her name, plus a branch of government and referred to as such by government and diplomats, and also an obscenely privileged commercial outfit. Now it has eight companies in five countries and is shifting money around between them.

So what sort of an organisation do you think the British Council wants to be?

The tortured logic of the British Council’s “Chief Executive”

The organisation’s “chief executive” has just sent out a circular (forwarded to me from two sources – thank you both) where he a) crows about deals with Microsoft and rather obviously looks to claim the credit for something which is down to the taxpayers’ subsidy, b) tells his staff that they have to learn to spend the taxpayers’ money faster and makes that faster spending a “goal” for the financial year (some “chief executive”!) , c) tells them that at the same time they have to focus on income rather than expenditure and d) warns the old crocks in the organisation that they will be put out to grass as the org is re-skilling commercially.

You think I’m exaggerating? Try this:
One challenge coming to the fore again as we approach the end of financial year is to get better at delivering our work more evenly through the year. Yet again, we’re spending too great a proportion of our grant funding too late in the year. Spending half our grant income in the last three months of the year is far from ideal because it leaves us with little time to adjust, it makes us look inefficient, and it risks at the very least the impression of poor spending decisions. In this tough economic environment we also risk the government assuming we don’t need the money if they don’t see it being spent. We must do better and the Management Board has agreed to ensure that at least 25% of our discretionary spend is spent in the first quarter of the new financial year. We will all have to adjust the way we work to deliver this. Let’s make this a goal for next financial year!

What a nerve. And how sickening it is that this career parasite with several thousand underlings should be simultaneously posturing as commercially credible while urging them to spend their grant faster in order to look more efficient, and so ensure that their paymasters don’t assume that because the British Council doesn’t spend money fast enough it means they don’t need it. It’s the classic public money argument: make sure you spend all the money because otherwise you might have your budget cut.

But while that is, deplorably, standard practice in the civil service, the difference in the case of the British Council is that it also wishes to be seen as a commercial outfit, a credible partner for Microsoft, an organisation “which focuses on raising income… rather than one which focuses on how to spend”.  The irony of course is that without the subsidy nobody could deal with the organisation because it would collapse like an overbeaten meringue. And I would remind you that that statement came from the “chief executive” of an organisation which also claims to be a charity.

As we adapt to the world outside [sic], we will need to develop our many talented colleagues and attract specific new specialist skills along the way, such as commercial skills and partnership, digital and sector expertise. Some of this can be developed internally. Some will need to be brought in. It is for these reasons that we are offering an early departure scheme for senior managers in the UK and overseas to refresh our talent, help build capability and manage our headcount.

In other words all those who joined the British Council thinking the organisation had some sort of high minded mission are in for the chop.  Some of them must be thinking what I’m thinking. 

British Council "D list Masons" in Saudi

What follows is an unedited letter from a(nother) disenchanted British Council teacher. Evocative stuff, and well written. The picture shows the conditions described.

Dear Sir,

Please keep up the good work on your blog,

It's difficult to drag enough adjectives out of my vocabulary to describe how utterly reprehensible the British Council is, but I'll try. It is a pompous, greedy, spineless and nasty organisation guilty of truly breath taking callousness and hypocrisy.

Newly recruited teachers are saturated and brainwashed with thousands of memos and documents reminding them of what a holier-than-thou ethical saint the organisation is. How it 'promotes mutual trust and dialogue, respects employees' diversity, treats staff fairly blah blah pass the sick bag please..

I worked for the British Council's Jeddah teaching centre where I failed to feel much charity being passed around.

Teachers were routinely bullied and pressurised into accepting teaching assignments and obligations not stated in their contracts. Our TCM, an autocratic and overbearing man with the tact of a chainsaw attempted to send us out to service ££ generating off-site contracts (not part of our agreements)in remote parts of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia without any consultation or regard for our personal safety.

A senior teacher was victimised and effectively forced to resign when he attempted to stand-up to the TCM and Deputy TCM when they tried to manipulate him into taking on additional teaching hours.

When Jeddah had torrential rain resulting in a flood in 2011, the same dithering, incompetent and irresponsible man delayed closing the centre because of his wretched profit (sorry, surplus as the BC says) priority. He ordered teachers and local staff to stay in the centre as the rainwater reached two feet outside and the local exams staffed were trapped overnight (naturally he had the self preservation and nerve to leave first!).

Oh yes, there was the usual 'investigation' (whitewash) where the usual procession of BC senior managers, line-towing yes men and poster boys for superannuated mediocrity who look after each other like D list masons, found him not guilty.

Placement testing students were duped into paying test fees when courses had already filled, and students who lost 40% of their courses because of the earlier flood closure didnt receive a nickel of a refund.

The organisation treats its teachers like whores and its students like walking ATMs. Teachers have to teach for six hours without breaks.

The British Council is to ethical business what a serial sex offender is to restraint. It has no business calling itself a charity.

So glad the Russians kicked this venal, pretentious and devious charlatan out of its country. They are not stupid and know a wolf in sheeps clothing spouting partnerships when they see one.

John

The reality of British Council’s “soft diplomacy”: contempt for employees, contempt for local legislation, and contempt of court

Readers of this blog may remember the story of Christopher Chadwick and his battle with the British Council in Poland – catch up here. His battle was about unfair dismissal. Here’s another one – and it’s another cracker.

“GE” (we suppress his full name so as not to compromise his employment prospects elsewhere) was first employed by the British Council in Paris in 2000. In 2007, after seven years of uninterrupted employment, he was summarily dismissed on the telephone with no reason given. You may ask whether that fits in with the British Council’s picture of itself as a caring, conscientious, principled employer. The point was that since GE was originally appointed as a freelance teacher, the BC decided that they could just drop him when it suited them. After seven years. Well, as most readers will know, you can’t do that in Britain, and you can’t do that in France.  So GE took legal action.

The wheels of justice grind slowly everywhere but always slower when the British Council is involved as the org seeks to prevaricate, circumvent, obfuscate, procrastinate and use all other manner of means to evade investigation. In this case this included wheeling in the British ambassador Sir Peter Westmacott to produce a statement in support of the British Council’s claim of diplomatic Immunity – a claim which the French courts treated with suitable disdain. But not even the British Council can postpone such things for ever. The case was heard and GE won. But the British Council appealed, so adding a further delay – of three years.

In the appeal court the British Council restated their position and made various claims purporting to prove that GE was not an employee. The judge was having none of it and ordered the British Council to pay damages and expenses. And the British Council was also ordered – twice - to provide pay slips so that an assessment of pension contributions etc. could be made. That was on 18^th November 2010, and then again on 27^th October 2011. It’s now February 2012 and the British Council is, incredibly, still dragging its feet. Indeed the British Council is now in contempt of the French courts, and on March 13^th the organisation must appear before the “Juge de l’Exécution” whose role is to enforce the decisions of the court. By refusing to produce pay slips, the British Council is also liable to a charge of non-payment of state taxes – something the French take every bit as seriously as the Russians (where the BC eventually coughed up £1.4 million). Meanwhile the BC has turned to the Supreme Court (“Cour de Cassation”) in a last ditch attempt to have the case thrown out.

On April 1^st 2011, with the BC still not complying with the court order, GE arranged to have the British Council’s bank accounts frozen. That was no poisson d’avril, and with such pressure applied the BC paid up the sums so far assessed; no problem for the British Council as it turned out as their local bank account contained over 700,000 Euros.

It would of course have been a lot simpler, and cheaper, if the British Council had understood that they were at fault and settled immediately. But instead the organisation spent large sums on legal fees (BC Paris spent over 81 thousand Euros on legal fees between January 2007 and November 2009 alone), paid for their prevarication, paid for the appeal and lost anyway. And how they wriggled. In July 2010 the British Council’s “Chief Executive” Martin Davidson was obliged to write a letter to Sir Menzies Campbell on the matter where he claimed that the org followed French labour legislation “to the full.” Tell that to the marines. This totally unnecessary case has lasted for years causing distress and hardship to a teacher who was completely loyal and very well thought of, it has made both the British Council and the FCO look very foolish in a place where we are supposed to be winning friends and influence, and has resulted in an enormous waste of time and money.

Only a few of such stories see the light of day – but they all point to a crass, spoiled, arrogant and incompetent employer making a general hash of things all over the place in our name. People like Sir Menzies Campbell should stop taking communications from the organisation at face value, rein the organisation in, make it properly accountable and subject its entire construct to radical review. 

Harriet Harman misses the point

In today’s Sunday Times (can’t link to it I’m afraid but it’s on page 4) Labour, and specifically shadow Culture Secretary Harriet Harman, takes a poke at Jeremy Hunt for presuming to consider legislation in respect of search engines such as Google and Yahoo when he himself owns a “search engine” called Hotcourses. I’m probably the last person to jump to the defence of Mr Hunt, but holding a discreet database of courses (or car parts or anything else) which can be interrogated online is quite different both qualitatively and quantitatively from a search engine, which is constantly out there adding robotically to an unlimited myriad of links.  Not really a casus belli I wouldn’t have thought.

If Ms Harman had looked in the right place she might have found something a little more pertinent. The value of Hotcourses, and therefore of Mr Hunt’s shares in the company, is closely aligned to his monopolistic and symbiotic contractual arrangements with the taxpayer funded entity called The British Council. For the past 11 years Hotcourses has had the sole contract to sell the British Council’s services in respect of the “Education UK” database of courses, and for most of that period has also had the contract to collect and hold that data.

1. When (in 2002) the British Council sought to interest British universities, schools and colleges in their Education UK web service, the organisation claimed publically, in circulars and on their website, that their contract was with a “consortium” consisting of Hotcourses, UCAS, CSU and Yahoo. The British Council was lying and there was no such consortium. But Ms Harman might like to ask exactly why the British Council mentioned Yahoo then in the same breath as Hotcourses, and enquire what exactly was/is the link between Hotcourses and Yahoo. (Because there was one, wasn’t there, Jeremy).

2. The contract that the British Council signed in 2001 with Education Websites Ltd (the company that they tried to bury in 2005 whose managing director was one Jeremy Hunt) included the following clause (10.4):

“Any data specifically collected for the purposes of this contract including the database of prospective students (and which may include databases of English language courses and of independent schools) will be jointly owned by both the Client and the Contractor. On the termination of this Agreement, both parties shall be entitled to use such data and to sublicence its use”.

In other words, data, including data about institutions and courses and students, that was collected supposedly on behalf of the British Council for the “Prime Minister’s Initiative” was, and is, also owned by the company owned by the present Culture Secretary, and indeed just as his company sells that Hotcourses data service, it also sells the parallel one for the British Council. And he’s got it for good.

3. Given that the success of the Culture Secretary’s business is so closely aligned with the taxpayer-funded British Council, that it has been this way unbroken since early 2001, including both the data collected, the working of the website and the sales of the services, it would be fair to say that the Culture Secretary enjoys something close to a state subsidised monopoly in the educational course market. Yes, the quality is lousy, but that’s not the point. The point is that we pay for the British Council, and we pay for the Culture Secretary, and that they also collude commercially through subsidised business interests.

It is in fact because we pay so much to support the British Council that the organisation is able to set up and sustain monopolistic arrangements such as the one described here, and in this case the company that has shared that monopoly belongs to Mr Hunt – an arrangement that has lasted for more than a decade. What Ms Harman might like to do is contact the British Council and Mr Hunt and expose this seedy tryst. She might then lecture them both in the need for open markets, free enterprise and level playing fields. Go for it, Hattie.

British Council loses Chevening Scholarship scheme

So my sources tell me anyway – although there’s no sign of it yet on the British Council or FCO sites. The Chevening Scholarship scheme, currently administered by the British Council on behalf of the FCO will in future be administered by the Association of Commonwealth Universities.

I have no information as to why this has happened, whether it was for example because of the general incompetence or corruption of the British Council, or whether it was because of incompetence and corruption in the British Council specifically linked to Chevening scholarships such as blew up a few years ago in Bahrain - perhaps we shall hear.

The British Council describes itself as “The United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities”. A rubbish website, a defunct Prime Minister’s Initiative, no status for their accreditation scheme, no support for the ELT sector, and now no scholarships; those “educational opportunities” seem to have worn a bit thin. And that just leaves “cultural relations”. Fortunately for the British Council nobody, including the British Council, knows what they are.

The PM preaches open markets while his government practises privilege

David Cameron here: ‘We won’t build a better economy by turning our back on the free market. We’ll do it by making sure the market is fair as well as free… open markets and free enterprise can actually promote morality’.

He talks the talk, but he does not walk the walk. While Cameron talks up free markets, the Foreign Secretary and his team of FCO diplomats amend the agenda. Only a few years ago we quoted the wretched British ambassador in Libya saying that the British Council represented the best of Britain, even as the organisation was brownnosing its way into the tender parts of the Gaddafi clan. Today Hague tells the doubtless underwhelmed Brazilians (whose economy has overtaken ours by hard work and enterprise) that the British Council budget for Brazil has been trebled. Wow. Thank you massa. And all at arm’s length too.

Meanwhile the ambassador in the Ukraine gushes about the British Council (as it collects another monopoly insider contract) “The British Council has a global ambition to provide learning and teaching materials to all teachers and learners of English worldwide”. A sort of global interference model.

While the BC swan around the world flashing their credit cards in fancy restaurants, while they spend millions refurbishing their centres, and then get civil service pensions paid for by the taxpayer (having collected a gong or two on the way for what passes for “public service”), the taxpayer goes on being asked to cough up more and more for them, and so ensure that markets do not work and that competition is not free and fair. For, Mr Cameron, if open markets and free enterprise can promote morality, the corollary is that closed markets, cronyism, and support for inefficiency, incompetence and unwarranted privilege promote corruption, arrogance and waste. The British Council. QED.

Austerity bypass for the British Council

As the cuts deepen at home, not all public bodies are feeling the pinch. The British Council in Sri Lanka is having a refurbishment, and we’re not just talking about a paint and carpet job; this one is costing £3 million.

“The premises project involves a brand new state-of-the-art library, a new multi-purpose auditorium, an integrated customer services centre, and refurbished classrooms amongst other improvements. “

This will help the British Council to peel more money off the locals. As it says on the BC Sri Lanka website:

“Membership of the British Council represents great value for money. Where else can you improve your prospects and enrich your life for as little as 5 rupees a day?... Belonging to the British Council can give a person a competitive edge that can only be gained from being a part of the British Council family.“

We have, in fact, heard about this particular branch of the “family” on this blog before – we just didn’t name it then. But it was in precisely this British Council centre that our inside reporter Ian Pennington came across so much that was disturbing about IELTS arrangements.  Worse than that was the British Council’s response to reports about lack of compliance at the centre; because the British Council owns the IELTS test, teaches for the IELTS test, administers the IELTS test and monitors itself for compliance with its own rules, it doesn’t really need to get things right. Because if things go wrong, who’s looking, and who’s going to do anything about it? Ian gave us more information later.

This is just one way the "United Kingdom's international organisation" makes loads of money in places like Sri Lanka so that, armed with all their subsidies and privileges from the taxpayer (who for all we know might even have paid for the building in Sri Lanka in the first place), British Council officers turn a blind eye to poor or dishonest practice, while they travel first class, eat in fancy restaurants, play with Lego, and whizz around the Eye all at the taxpayers’ expense, and still spend millions on refurbishment so they can persuade more locals that they can buy a competitive edge and enrich their lives as they cough up more rupees to join the British Council “family”. I am surely not alone in finding this nauseating as well as outrageous.

That Credit Card Bill

You cannot have missed all the press comment on the British Council’s credit card expenditure in upmarket hotels and restaurants, first class travel etc. I personally doubt whether that raised any eyebrows because everybody knows by now that this is what they do. OK, maybe they didn’t know about spending money on haircuts, Lego, Primark (oh dear) and iTunes, but it wasn’t a lot of money (only £479.92 on Lego for example, and a miserly £83.30 at The Body Shop), and we expect public servants to get away with such things. What irks me, however, is the standard British Council defence which boils down to:

1. Only a third of our funding comes from the taxpayer
2. We generate (think of a figure) in revenue for the British economy

Today’s fantasy figure is £1.2 billion, which their spokeswoman described as a return of £6 for every £1 invested by taxpayers.

The information given out by this unnamed spokeswoman is misleading. It is true that only a third of the current account in any given year is gifted by the taxpayer in the form of the FCO grant, but the rest comes mainly on a plate, and from the taxpayer. For example, a look at DFID procurement for 2009 reveals that in August that year the British Council got a contract worth £2,999,980.00 for “Managing Organisation for Community Linking Programme”. £20 short of £3 million looks like a pretty heavy management fee. In April that year the British Council also got a contract worth £31,346,646.00 from DFID for the “Global Schools Project” (which I think must be the one the BBC advertises night and day). Could it be that the British Council won this contract because they have a global network of offices, paid for by the taxpayer? Hardly a fair fight.

And as for generating £1.2 billion for the British economy, oh please. The British Council is awash with privileges including grants, closed contracts, diplomatic status, charitable status, government status, non-government status, a private for-profit company, civil service pensions, and more featherbeds than you can shake a stick at. Each year they hold out their hands for millions, spend it all and then come back the following year for more. A few years ago Lord Kinnock claimed that the British Council was “an organisation that generates £1.76 for every £1.00 given” which was of course nonsense then. Since then the spin doctors have managed to inflate Lord K’s figure by 350%. The British Council alchemy is not turning every pound into either £1.76 or £6.00, but the rather more finding a plethora of routes to taxpayers’ money, and then the rather more banal one of turning those millions into 0 pence. And along the way they find time to download iTunes, whizz around the London Eye, and play with Lego.

Huffington Post on this here. Downloadable spreadsheet here.

Ten years of British Council rubbish

Today we mark the tenth anniversary of the launch of the British Council "Education UK" website, and lament not just its failure but the damage caused to institutions, especially in the United Kingdom, by its particular brand of taxpayer-sponsored aggressive incompetence. For all of those ten years, and a bit longer, the project has been the property of the British Council but licensed to the company of Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary. And who is now, worryingly, in charge of the Olympic Games.

This particular fiasco has its roots in the “Prime Minister’s Initiative” – the occasion when Tony Blair put up public money to support international student recruitment. The initiative was then put in the hands of the British Council, and thus condemned at birth. Years later, while the “PMI” was allegedly still alive, we were treated to the craven Gordon Brown actually bragging that he was reducing student numbers, and today… well, we hardly need to go into that again.

Such initiatives are simply platforms for the British Council to preen itself publicly and make inflated claims; this “PMI” at one time had the British Council claiming, in Parliament as well as in public reports, that they were recruiting a million students per year.  Today, when institutions could use some political support from the organisation that has made so much money out of them, those absurd claims have melted away and support there is none.

Yes, of course I have an interest to declare. But one reason that I must point these things out is that the institutions who suffer most from the British Council are ones which depend on the organisation for accreditation and, to some extent, for international representation, and keep their heads down.  And their association is stuck with them anyway. For all our sakes, the British Council should be dismantled, and their wretched “Education UK” website would be a good place to start.