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".
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