The Language Business

How the British Council organises unfair competition

A document recording the deliberations of British Council senior managers last month has come my way.  Dated May 19^th, it gives the names of those present and records that Martin Davidson, the organisation’s “Chief Executive”, was on the call. It’s about the FCO’s perceptions,  the BC’s “engagement”, their job security, and their money. It also refers to, ho-ho, avoiding “LSE moments” (and if the BC actually has avoided an LSE moment it’s something of a fluke given the extent to which it used public money to suck up to Saif-El-Islam Gaddafi ; perhaps rather than crowing about “LSE moments” the organisation would like to come clean about that to Lord Woolf’s enquiry?).

Meanwhile look at the first sentence of the section headed “Partnerships and Business Development” reproduced in full (we have redacted a couple of names):

“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.”

Too bloody right they are. Martin Davidson (like his predecessor and his former chair Lord Kinnock) has given evidence to parliamentary committees to the effect that there is no possibility of grant-funded and FCR funded services touching each other, that they are completely separate. “ we ensure through a clear firewall, that there is no subsidy of our teaching or other operations from the grant”.  (see Q9).

It is significant that nobody present at this meeting thought to address the actual issue of unfair competition, or why it matters. Rather the dialogue recorded simply confirms that unfair competition from the British Council is an organised fact. They refer to the integration of grant-funded and FCR funded English services. As Davidson says, who is going to look into the minutiae of their accounts? Not even the NAO presumably, which ignored the reservations of Lord Carter of Coles, and for years has gone along with the charade of the British Council “firewall”.

Voici la preuve. Here, on the record, a dozen senior British Council managers, grant-funded themselves of course and thus in clear contempt of any mythical firewall, discuss how they will “monetize their digital offer”, “grow FCR contracts”, “grow sponsorships… English and exams”, while embedding an understanding of the” trickier legal issues”.  We all know why the BC continues with this deceit; quite simply if the playing field were level the organisation would disappear. But as taxpayers, subsidising unfair state competition against genuine enterprise at home and abroad, we have an absolute right to know why the FCO, the NAO, the Cabinet Office, the FAC, the PAC, the Charity Commission, the Competition Commission and all the rest do nothing to put this shabby house in order, put a stop to this abuse of public money, and institute proper democratic accountability.

The Growing Isolation of Private Sector EFL

Political support is on the retreat for private sector English language teaching in Britain, especially in non-devolved England.  We have yet to see whether devolved Scotland, Wales and NI can muster support through their channels. For something built over a long period can be fairly quickly dismantled. The private sector set up its own representative organisation – ARELS - in 1960. In 2004 ARELS ceased to exist as it merged with BASELT to form English UK. Whereas ARELS had until then represented the interests of the private sector, and BASELT – albeit less dynamically – had represented the interests of state sector EFL, the newly unified English UK, now resolutely in bed with the British Council, supposedly represented the interests of “the industry” at large. It hasn’t worked.

This new body sought monopoly power. Organisations offering alternative publishing or promotional or accreditation arrangements were actively campaigned against. For example, in May 2004 English UK registered a limited company “The Association of British Language Schools Ltd” simply to prevent ABLS from forming a company with that name, and subsequently asked its members to write to their political representatives in order to force the separation of ABLS the association and the accrediting body. ABLS complied with this, and it also renamed the accreditation part “The Accreditation Body for Language Services Ltd” thereby retaining the integrity of their acronym and also working their way round the crude English UK sledge hammer. The action by English UK was not only unnecessary and vindictive; the organisation that had campaigned for that separation in ABLS between association and accreditation with blithe hypocrisy now formed “Accreditation UK” jointly with the British Council, so that their accrediting body and their association membership were pretty well indistinguishable.

Where has all this mean manoeuvring got them? I hold no brief for ABLS and am mercifully independent of all associations and accrediting bodies. However, one thing I did learn a few years ago was that to align yourself with the British Council is a mistake, and is likely to be dangerous. The organisation has no spine, no direction and no purpose beyond its own wellbeing. When there is a fair wind from government behind international students, the British Council jump to the fore, claim the credit and screw things up. When the wind changes, as it has in recent years, the claims disappear and the support – however inept - melts away. Today the private sector casts about for the support that it badly, and specifically, needs. And it won’t come from that lot.

It is hard to see where it might come from. According to our ruling statist xenophobic party it is the business of the border guards division of the Home Office to decide who is responsible for “educational oversight”, and the decision has been made; it is not just the nature of this decision but the way such decisions have been taken which points to a crumbling of our democratic institutions. The decree (for that is what it is) says that inspections of private sector EFL will now be under the auspices of the Independent Schools Inspectorate, which will therefore now have to bone up on how this is to be done. Historians might note how the whole concept has morphed from “Recognition” (i.e. being recognised as efficient) through “Accreditation” (a British Council imprimatur), thence into the choppy waters of alignment with visa status and finally into “educational oversight” (a new concept formally acknowledging state control).  

And then there’s the right to work issue. The right to work will cease to exist for students who are visa nationals attending a private sector institution, but will be maintained for students attending a publicly funded institution. Where on earth is the justice in that? And look at the language:

 From 4 July we will:

• restrict work entitlements to migrants studying at higher educational institutions (HEIs) and publicly funded further education colleges only

Students are still referred to by The Party as “migrants”, which is as outrageous as it is stupid.

And what exactly will “English UK” do about this? The arrangement makes the public sector much more attractive to overseas students than the private sector and so will suit the public sector nicely. And be damaging for the private sector. But, as related above, private sector representation in EFL has been voted out of existence, and the unified body can hardly campaign for the interests of some and against the interests of others among its members. And even if it can, it can’t be credible. The organisation, through vociferous campaigns vis-à-vis the Home Office Select Committee and other parliamentary groups, stirred up a hornets’ nest with the intention of establishing monopoly power and privilege for itself, and has now got stung. Especially the private sector. Private sector EFL is moving ever further up sh*t creek, and not a paddle in sight.

 

The Radical Realist

Do not miss this essay by John Ward.

"Reaching more than 46 Million"

The trouble with web statistics is that they are like other statistics. They can be created for politicians who then dutifully announce them as if stating some sort of objective truth. The Foreign Secretary announced – or else was reported as saying - yesterday that the British Council “reached more than 46 million people across the globe through its online work in the last year alone”. This is balls. The British Council has, we can only presume, aggregated some stats reported by their analytics programmes as being “unique visitors”, come to 46 million, and passed this headline total on to their gullible and ignorant paymasters in the FCO. Who evidently lap it up.

If I do the same thing with visitor stats in respect of my company’s sites the figure is a lot smaller, at about 3.5 million (as an aside that represents a ratio of 1:13 in respect of stats, while their staff outnumber ours by about 3000:1). But if I said my company had “reached 3.5 million” through our online work, it would be grossly misleading. Firstly, if somebody somewhere uses one of our sites I haven’t “reached” them any more than somebody opening a dictionary in a library has been reached by, say, Oxford University Press. Secondly, every website records a significant level of “bounce”; that is when a visitor (unique or otherwise) loads one page and then, for whatever reason, backs out again and goes elsewhere – so the stat is worthless. That applies to our sites, and will certainly apply at least as much to the ponderous and arcane sites of the British Council. That factor alone would almost certainly reduce the 46 million quoted to less than 30 million. Thirdly, the same visitor is likely to visit several of our sites, and return to them later, frequently using a different IP number - so they wouldn't be unique.

William Hague would have us believe (or else the poor chap actually believes) that this number has thereby, perhaps through some sort of system of cultural osmosis, absorbed “British values”. The thought is pretty desperate for another range of reasons. Does the British Council actually stand for “British values”? And what British values are likely to have been absorbed by a visitor to Education UK? That we don’t know how to organise a database? Or make a website work? That selection of universities is based on who pays the most? That visiting a British website is like banging your head against a wall?

You think I exaggerate? If Mr Hague or any of his cohorts read this, I invite them to visit the Education UK website, and look at the search facility on the right hand side of the home page. Choose, for example, Degree Courses as the course category and Applied and Pure Sciences as the subject area. The system will find 179 results and list the first ten by default. I know already, believe me I really do, which ten records will be listed first. And I know that if you count these ten listed institutions, it won’t add up to ten unique institutions.  Puzzled? Then try that search and you’ll see what I mean. Like any visitor using that site you can only conclude that a fundamental British value is chronic, endemic, prolonged and alarming incompetence. And the number of people exposed to that incompetence after ten years of the “Prime Minister’s Initiative” and Education UK is much, much greater than Mr Hague’s quoted 46 million.

That, Mr Hague, is the reality, and it really is time you woke up to it.

This Nothing Government

Hand on heart, now, do you know what this lot stand for? Sure they have plenty that they can lay at the door of the unappetising lot that passes for opposition, and of course they do so. But what are they for otherwise? The Big Society? If so, do you really get that, buy into it, and think it’s worth our government’s time? Europe? European reform? The USA?  Freedom? Social justice? Regeneration?

With necessary cuts in public expenditure, and consequent job loss in the public sector, work has to be created in the private sector.That’s not dogma, it’s absolutely essential if this country is not to go down the same pan as, well, a few others I could mention. David Cameron has talked of supporting enterprise, backing people who risk their own money to create businesses and employment, of “listening” – even if that all too often means short-term backtracking on a short-term policy. But the evidence from where I sit is that this is just something to which he pays lip service, perhaps because it makes him more palatable to his own rank and file. And he and his government must be judged by actions.

In so far as this general picture adversely affects international education, I would encourage you to read Patrick Watson’s piece “Is this government hostile to the profit motive?” on his blog. It reveals how hopeless the Cabinet Office is at even acknowledging, let alone answering, let alone addressing issues raised which – if you were to believe the rhetoric about the bonfire of the quangos etc. – you would have thought were right up their street. I don’t think we can claim, these days, to be shocked or surprised by government’s insouciance to issues which they profess to care about, but we can surely be disappointed and, if they really can’t do any better, turn up the volume on our discontent.

The quangocracy is in the way

Click on the picture and you’ll boot up a PDF of a sample of the latest edition of “Education Investor” magazine, wherein you can – if you subscribe – read an article about why those of us who work in international education feel like the man depicted, banging our heads against the proverbial brick wall. As we have for years. Because, as it says at the close of the article, “The quangocracy is in the way”.

Kevin McNeany, late of Nord Anglia and CEO today of Orbital Education, hits the spot when he says:

“it’s accepted in the industry that the British Council exists to continue the success of the British Council, rather than as an enabler for the industry”.

By way of reply the British Council wheels out the old chestnuts about “Chinese walls” in their accounting and no cross-subsidy.  But even if you accept the organisation’s arcane, mythical and self-serving model – which does not stand up to even the most benign analysis - it isn’t true anyway. 

It’s sad to reflect that while our competitors in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada and Ireland, are pushing the boat out to develop their international education services in order to recruit more students and build their resources at home and abroad, the UK is stuck with a “Border Agency” that slaps down international students, and is lumbered with the dead hand of the British Council clamped around the windpipe of British enterprise, all to the detriment of one of our most successful and important industries.