“I am satisfied that there is no basis for your claims” 25/6/04
“I remain satisfied that there is no basis for your claims” 22/11/04
The above quotations are taken from letters dated as given sent to me by the Director-General of the British Council, the first of which was copied to Charles Clarke MP, then DFES Secretary of State. In the second letter quoted, because I had appealed and requested a higher authority, I was referred by the DG to the Parliamentary Ombudsman, who in turn pointed out that the matter lay outside her office’s terms of reference. So that was that. If the head of a given organisation is judge and jury and also appeal court, and if, despite the fact that the organisation is publicly funded, there is no other mechanism to call the organisation to account, the rule must surely be that they had better stay out of trouble. Or at least not get caught. But the bad news for the Director-General’s satisfaction quotient is that, apart from rather obviously being right, a solid and substantial evidential basis for my claims has gradually been pieced together.
- In September 2001 the Council signed a contract with a specially created £100 company “Education Websites Ltd” to create the Education UK web site. (This company has since been “buried”).
- In October 2001 the Council asked me to sign a waiver permitting them to include EFL courses in their mega database i.e. agreeing that what they were doing was not competition. I agreed. There was no plan to develop a separate EFL course database, and in fact the data input for the planned single and comprehensive course database was already being implemented. The Council did not reveal that the competing contract they had just signed provided for profit-sharing, thereby adding a financial motive to one arrangement (i.e. with Education Websites Ltd) which was absent in the other (i.e. with EFL Services Ltd).
- On January 7th 2002 the new Education UK site was launched, and met with uproar from the EFL community. So dreadful was the result that in one week quite literally hundreds of complaints were made to ARELS, BASELT, Hotcourses and the British Council. Since the Education UK web site was the main manifestation of the Council’s operation of the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”, there was much egg. As we now know, at this point the Council appointed Cherry Gough and Richard Law, the ELT staff officially liaising with me with regard to the English in Britain products, to manage the development of a replacement EFL database. Fortunately for them, if less fortunately for us, a ready-made solution was at hand, the clear market leader and a proven success. And in their possession.
- On January 14th 2002 Cherry Gough informed the “small schools meeting” in Manchester that the Education UK regions (see our “Tangled web” piece) would be made similar to those in English in Britain.
- On January 15th 2002 senior BC manager Neil Kemp informed the EFL sector that the Council was going to develop a new dedicated EFL database for Education UK, to be “signed off” by their ELT staff. (I was not informed of this and the obvious conflict of interest was evidently not addressed).
- On January 28th 2002 the Director-General of the British Council wrote to the ARELS Chief Executive referring to Neil Kemp’s January 15th letter.
- On January 30th 2002 Cherry Gough and Richard Law arranged an unminuted meeting with Hotcourses to agree the new fields, searches and prices.
- On February 12th 2002 the Council convened a meeting with representatives of the EFL sector and Hotcourses to agree to fields and searches from a prepared handout and to discuss prices. This lunchtime meeting took English in Britain as a point of reference on several occasions, and although the minutes are no longer available (“we assume that no minutes were ever produced for this meeting”, BC FOI division), the minutes do exist, as do the memories and records of those who attended.
While the solution was clear to the Council, implementation took rather longer than they had hoped (they talked of completion in March). Their decision to produce an entirely new database on the lines of English in Britain meant writing new software and abandoning all the data input thus far, and it was a further 11 months before the new EFL course database saw the light of day. From a zero start to a finished product that is in fact fast, but then validation was a given.
My claim, made in August 2002 in a letter to Rod Pryde when the data input model was made available online, that the database structure was altogether too similar to the one evolved over the previous 12 years by this company (with whom they were still contracted to cooperate) to be anything but derivative, was dismissed first by Mandy Davies and then by Terry Toney. The database structure was, we were told, the product of “independent research”. “Independent” is a word that the Council tends to use differently from the rest of us (they claim, for example, to be “independent” of government from which they get a subsidy of £500,000.00 per day), but the phrase “independent research” has rarely been used so cynically. As the narrative shows, the decision to use the English in Britain data model was taken early in the crisis, and was clearly understood at every level of management. The Council did all this while being contractually committed to supporting English in Britain with their “best efforts”. No wonder they kept these developments secret. No wonder that they have been so keen to avoid independent investigation.
No basis for my claims? Pants. Santa’s pants? They’re on fire.
Epilogue: The BC staff involved were all promoted and posted abroad, even the one on a local UK contract. You can’t promote a Director-General, but in June 2004 the current incumbent got a knighthood. When I emailed Charles Clarke on March 22nd this year to remind him of my campaign and tell him what I was writing about, he emailed back to wish me “Good Luck!” A nice touch I thought.
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