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.