The Language Business

Eight Years Ago Today

Exactly eight years ago Tony Blair, Prime Minister, was in India where he opened a new British Council “Knowledge and Learning Centre” in Delhi. Not of itself a matter of great moment, but it was a big deal for the British Council which was by now charged with the execution of the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”. Which is why they chose the same day to launch the appalling “Education UK” web site. It bombed of course, and has never worked properly, but senior management at the British Council tends not to be concerned with such mundane matters as efficiency, functionality or value for money. This occasion was made for them. Here was the Prime Minister himself, opening a shiny new British Council facility, and they had a shiny new website to open in his honour. The chance was too good to miss; brownie points aplenty were there to be scored, and shedloads of gongs were sure to follow.

And so it proved. Never slow to praise itself, and with a blithe disregard of the facts, the British Council in its 2001-2002 annual report described the Prime Minister’s Initiative as “a significant success”. That same year in the Queen’s Birthday Honours the Director-General of the British Council was rewarded with a KCMG.

Meanwhile, for exactly eight years, and despite the fact that the British Council was informed of the problems from the outset, the Education UK web site, that flagship of the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”, has wasted British resources, and students’ time, in a big way. Thousands - indeed, if we are to believe the British Council propaganda machine, millions - of students directed to the site during the past eight years must have wondered whether they would be wise to study in a country that apparently leads its international student recruitment effort with a deeply flawed product. If the British can’t even get this website right, what, the students may well wonder, do these people really know about education? If the service was this bad in 2002, and it’s still this bad today in 2010, what does that say about these people’s interest in quality?

We have produced a series of videos demonstrating how the site fails to work in the interests of Loughborough, Glasgow Caledonian and Edinburgh Napier universities, the EFL sector, the boarding schools sector and, for the benefit of the British Council Chair for most of these eight years, Wales. That really ought to be enough. While the organisation used this dire product to extract millions of pounds from our universities and colleges, for eight years the Education UK web site has stood as testament to the British Council’s culpable neglect of the interests of international students and British educational institutions, and as a monument to its arrogance and its incompetence. Not to forget the pretentious absurdity of that new suit of clothes, the "Prime Minister’s Initiative".

Christmas Quiz: The Trustee Challenge

Better than those slips of paper in Christmas crackers or Trivial Pursuits, this is a special seasonal quiz for the British Council Trustees. Fingers on the buzzers.

1. When the Education UK website bombed in January 2002, who feared he could see a cloud over a gong?
2. In January 2002 the British Council announced on its website that it had a contract with a consortium of Hotcourses, UCAS, CSU and Yahoo! This was not true. Who in the organisation had the authority to instruct the organisation formally to misrepresent itself?
3. In January 2002 Dr Neil Kemp of the British Council emailed all British Council accredited English language providers, and told them that the Council had contracted Hotcourses, UCAS, CSU and Yahoo! He knew this to be false. Who in the organisation had the authority to instruct Dr Kemp to broadcast this perverse puff?
4. It has taken 7 years for the British Council trustees to entertain a complaint first made in 2002. Who in 2002 had the authority in the organisation so to order things that there would be no genuine investigation of my complaint, and has therefore obliged me to escalate matters to this point?
5. In June 2004, who issued a stitched-up report to mislead serving member of the Cabinet, the Rt Hon Charles Clarke?
6. In February 2005 the British Council’s Freedom of Information officer formally declared that there had been no changes to the contract the organisation had signed (with Education Websites Ltd) in 2001. That was not true. The contract had expired in September 2004 and been switched to another company, and burial arrangements were being made for Education Websites Ltd. Who in the organisation had the power and authority to make the FOI officer Chris Campbell perjure himself?
7. The Education UK website, the flagship of the “Prime Minister’s Initiative” has been a great British disgrace for 8 years, frustrating international students, and obstructing international student recruitment to our educational institutions. See, for example our videos on how it works for Glasgow Caledonian, Wales or EFL. Who is responsible for the mess?
8. In the present investigation, the investigator declines to address the contractual issues, the web announcements, emails, the FOI responses and other matters, did not interview any Council staff and avoided all contact with management, and produces no evidence or any statement from the British Council. Who is being protected? [Answers below]

Can the British Council trustees embrace the spirit of the age and deal with the issue head-on, or will they – in the name of loyalty or perhaps even invoking that old favourite “the national interest” - make themselves formally complicit in this tawdry business? We have senior government ministers embarrassed by porno expense claims while many MPs have resigned or been deselected in this scandal, and we have emerging evidence of how an illegal war was waged, while our soldiers die in far-off places for uncertain benefits. Surely the country can stand the truth about the British Council.

Season’s Greetings to all readers.

1. Santa 2. Santa 3. Santa 4. Santa 5. Sir Santa 6. Sir Santa 7. Sir Santa 8. Sir Santa 

Education UK Web case study: Wales

It’s only a taster rather than an in-depth study (how much more do I have to do for them?) but it reveals how institutions in Wales are short-changed by the British Council’s Education UK web site. It also shows what it is like to use the “official” British international student recruitment site that comes with the support of the Prime Minister, and has enjoyed this support, and caused such immense frustration, for 8 years. For almost all of that period the Chair of the British Council was Lord Kinnock who is of course a Welshman.

Education UK Web case study: Edinburgh Napier University

If you have watched our videos about Loughborough and Glasgow Caledonian, you may not wish to view another in the same vein (even if it has one or two new angles). But just as we chose Glasgow Caledonian because the Principal and Vice-Chancellor is a British Council trustee, and therefore really needs to do something about the mess, this time we have chosen a university whose VC is the Universities UK representative on the Education UK Partnership board, and it would seem she has a duty to sort this out for the other two universities (and the 300 or whatever it is other HE institutions) as well as her own. There are plenty more examples if you scroll down through this blog.

It is something of a disgrace that an official, government-funded organisation should put forward this third rate service in our names, with our money, to the exclusion of professional services, and be allowed to pretend that it is actually helping international student recruitment, when plainly it is just getting in the way. British educational institutions would do well to cut off the inflated payments demanded by the British Council for its services, which are in any case purely a function of its taxpayer funded network, and it really should not be allowed to ask for any more money anyway.

That Education UK Web Story

 
On January 29th 2002, almost 8 years ago, the British Council was very disturbed. It realised that the launch of their Education UK website, a direct and high profile result of the interest of Downing Street and the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”, with gongs riding on it, had been a disaster. On that day therefore a series of announcements were made, each directed at a different sector of the UK’s educational establishment. I have dug the pages out of the web archive (NB archive pages are SLOW to load) for reference, so that we have here the general one with the links. The links on that page still work and take you the original, unsullied, archived material. (Note that these pages all take 20-30 seconds to load from the web archive, so be patient and wait. Think of your first experience of the World Wide Web. They will come up).

There’s plenty of evidence of panic:

1) Following the disastrous launch, the site is now described as a “prelaunch testing version”. How they must have struggled with such a formula.

2) The Independent Colleges page is actually headed “Independent Schools”. The pages were not even proof read.

3) The Boarding Schools page declares an intention to have “details of the age range, gender mix and general course offerings of schools”. But as we can see (video here) , they never succeeded.

4) There are rash and foolish promises such as “Our longer term priorities will be the development of the on-line counselling functions, the enhancements of the on-line applications facility and the possible integration of telephone call centre technology into the site.” Oh dear.

5) They invent recent history on all the pages. “After a rigorous selection procedure, the British Council entered into a contractual partnership with a consortium led by Hotcourses to develop the Education UK web site and associated databases. The other consortium members are UCAS, CSU and Yahoo!”. Actually they contracted a £100 company Education Websites Ltd, and tried to bury the evidence a few years later. UCAS and CSU were specifically excluded from the contract, and there was no contractual relationship with Yahoo of any kind. There was no need to lie to everybody, so let’s put it down to panic.

6) The “rigorous selection procedure” meant negotiating a contract which paid a percentage of the profits to the British Council. Rigour? Please.

7) On the FE page they say “Over the course of the next few weeks we will be continuing to work on the search functions for EL providers and Schools”. Actually they had just abandoned their previously chosen search functions and were starting again. And we can see today (video here) that they hadn’t a clue what they were doing.

8) On the HE page it notes that the HE data is taken from UCAS and CSU and so “should be correct”. Indeed, it should have been. It was. The problem for the last 8 years has been that the British Council didn’t have a mechanism to search through that data properly (see our videos on Loughborough and Glasgow Caledonian).

It was a terrible mess. They have had 8 years to sort out that mess, and they have not done so. It’s still a terrible mess, and the British Council’s pretence that the Education UK site has been instrumental in international student recruitment and has “achieved its goals” is patent hogwash. Like the organisation behind it, the Education UK website has simply got in everybody’s way.

Credit where credit's due

I'm prepared to admit that I may have produced too much knocking copy, by highlighting course records on quality sites which could not be found or are somehow scrambled on Education UK. So, in the interests of balance, let me put that right. Here below is a small selection of courses that will not be found on the professional sites, and which are uniquely found on Education UK. There are many more of course. Some, like the "Pagan Sex" course identified earlier are Postgraduate, which I think is understandable, and some undergraduate. In all cases Education UK is anxious to get the visitor off the HE search and into English language courses or, as we would say, out of the frying pan and into the fire.

 

500 Years of Waste

Presumably it is not just Loughborough and Glasgow Caledonian universities who have twigged the extent of the Education UK failure at the level of Higher Education, or Dollar Academy the hopeless service offered to the Boarding School sector (which the British Council now has the neck to charge £1950.00 as a registration fee) or the EFL sector - bear in mind that the results of ANY search on Education UK are headed by an exhortation to search for English language courses - or Summer schools etc.
Education UK, that priority service arising from the “Prime Minister’s Initiative” (aka PMI), represents failure on a grand scale. Expensive failure too. Not only because the schools, the colleges and the universities have, for the past 8 years, been asked to shell out large sums to the already heavily floated and bloated British Council, but also expensive because it doesn’t do the job.

The British Council claims that the Education UK websites attract over 1 million visitors a month. You have only to look at the sites to see that they could not possibly attract that sort of number. It is rather that the British Council’s state-endowed network and the rest of the Establishment has been persuaded, by the British Council and the pomp and majesty of the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”, to direct visitors to this woefully inadequate resource. Even if we make the generous but clearly fallacious assumption that by a twist of fate half the visitors to this site find what they are looking for, and that the other half waste only 5 minutes each before they realise that they have hit Duff City and go elsewhere, that still means 2.5 million minutes monthly wasted on the site. 2.5 million minutes per month wasted over a year amounts to 57 years. Over the life of the site that would be between 400 and 500 years.

And they can’t say they weren’t warned. On October 11th, 2002 I wrote this in a letter to Rod Pryde, Assistant Director-General of the British Council:

“The Education UK web site today is manifestly doing more harm than good to international students, British education, and the British Council. Every time you ask a student to use it you are in effect encouraging a British Council bypass, and risking a Britain bypass. British institutions are being encouraged by the Council to pay to be linked or profiled or whatever on that site, and they do it because of such credibility as the Council still enjoys. But it’s a poor investment from all points of view - a sort of virtual clip-joint masquerading as public service.”

And of course it’s the same today. 500 years later. It is because British Council personnel have been spending their time dreaming up “innovative, inspirational” superlatives to describe themselves, and nobody in the organisation has spent even a few minutes making an intelligent appraisal of the rubbish they peddle. Just think what they could have saved. And think too how much better both students and educational establishments would have been served for these last eight years if only the Prime Minister had really used his initiative rather than gifting yet another monopoly to this deeply incompetent organisation.

PBS Review - your help needed

In July we posted a reaction to the Home Affairs Select Committee meeting in June, and speculated on the consequences. These have turned out to be worse even than feared, as the government is conducting a hurried review into Tier 4 of the Points Based System (governing student visas) and proposing to raise the educational levels required for visas to be granted. This would have the effect of closing down year-round language schools, GCSE and A Level Colleges and other establishments who have so much invested in bringing students, and enormous invisible earnings, to this country. It would mean large scale unemployment for teachers and significant loss of income for the thousands of host families who also depend on this industry. It would mean losing a network, a jewel which has been built up since the Second World War by uncountable numbers of pioneers, teachers, schools, and accommodation providers. It would mean not only losing the businesses, the income, the jobs, but also the valuable contacts and breadth of experience and pleasure these students bring to us.

Please sign the Downing Street petition here: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/PBSReview/

Education UK Web Case Study: Glasgow Caledonian University

There is more than one reason for this video. Firstly, it demonstrates that the example we made with Loughborough University is easily replicated with another UK university (and we could continue in that vein ad nauseam). Secondly, we have deliberately targeted a university whose Vice-Chancellor and Principal is a British Council Trustee.

1. The Higher Education Service we describe here for Glasgow Caledonian (and as we did a couple of days ago for Loughborough) is rather obviously substandard. But it is a great deal better than the service provided for, for example, the English language course providers or British boarding schools.
2. This embarrassingly poor quality service has been what the British Council has offered the world at large on behalf of British education for almost eight years. Far from giving the UK competitive advantage during that time, the Education UK service of the British Council has been a dead weight on international student recruitment.
3. During those eight years, many British Council staff have been awarded gongs by HM The Queen for their involvement in the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”, and have retired summa cum laude on comfortable state pensions. But what they did for Britain, for international student recruitment and British educational institutions, would be a joke if it were not so damaging.
4. British Universities and Colleges and Schools, not to mention the ever-raided British taxpayers, have handed over millions to this organisation, which has taken the money and provided a nil or just shoddy service in return. Quite apart from the £200 million taxpayer subvention, the tax breaks and the unfunded pensions of which the organisation is a beneficiary, universities each pay the British Council up to £20,000, plus £800 or so per country for local intelligence, per year, before they can even have a stand at an exhibition (which then has to be paid for again). The Education UK website meanwhile is little more than a virtual clipjoint.

The British Council counts on the Establishment to back them through thick and thin, and to licence them to leverage their state-funded buildings, resources and privileges to provide unfair competition with genuine enterprise and expertise, at home and abroad. Almost any company could have done a better job of using the Internet for international marketing and student recruitment than the British Council has done with Education UK. But the government uses state funds to enhance the organisation’s privilege, to shore up its propaganda machine, and to deny opportunity. That’s eight years wasted so far.

Education UK Web Case Study: Loughborough University

This blog and video have been produced without any contact with Loughborough University. The piece is about the Education UK web site, and simply uses Loughborough University as a worked example. Almost any other institution could have been chosen to make similar or parallel points.

The underlying point is this: the British Council in 2002 launched a new web site which, by virtue of Prime Ministerial backing, made competition for those working in the same market rather difficult. Everybody surely by now knows that the BC fouled up the English language side of things, and that the service for boarding schools and summer schools is dire, but what about HE? The fact is that UK universities pay through the nose for the British Council’s marketing services and that the Education UK web site tops the list of alleged benefits.

This dreadful site is about to be swept under the carpet to make room for something new this autumn/winter. This means that there may not be much longer to verify all that I am now recording for posterity on video. But all those who have parted with good money over the past 7 going on 8 years might pause to reflect on what a mess the bloated British Council, gifted yet another state-endowed monopoly, have made. Genuine businesses can’t get away with either this sustained incompetence or such gross overcharging. Really the universities and colleges should ask for their money back.

To increase the screen size, click on the square at the bottom right of the screen or else watch the video on the YouTube site.

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, particularly 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.