Not resting, not asleep, not pining for the fjords. Education UK is dead.
This is from a British Council record of a meeting in May 2002 intended to reassure the ELT sector:
We explained that the site was part of the Prime Minister's Initiative and intended to spearhead a major boost in the number of international students recruited to the UK... the government and the British Council are spending millions of pounds promoting the Education UK brand (and the website associated with it)...
Because our English in Britain stood in the way, the British Council offered to "alleviate" the problem of "paying twice" by reducing the first year fee for the schools. That bribe was unhelpful, but of course you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear, and Education UK was one hell of a sow's ear.
Leading the pack was this man, Dr Neil Kemp. In a circular to the entire UK ELT sector in January 2002 (follow link for the complete document) he wrote as follows:
After a rigorous selection procedure, the British Council entered into a contractual partnership with a consortium led by Hotcourses to develop the Education UK website and associated databases. The other consortium members are UCAS, CSU and Yahoo.
That was unhelpful too. Kemp didn't mention the "exclusive" agreement his organisation had signed with my company in respect of providing exactly the same service for the sector, and of course it wasn't easy for us to be credible competition when up against the BC, UCAS, CSU and Yahoo - not to mention the Prime Minister and the government's millions in promotional cash. It turned out, however, that the "consortium led by Hotcourses" was a £100 company ("Education Websites Ltd") whose shareholders were Hotcourses Ltd, UCAS Enterprises Ltd and CSU Ltd - the latter pair risking all of £20 in this venture. And Yahoo? Ask yourself first whether Yahoo would be an investor in a £100 company. Actually Yahoo (hard to believe today but the clear leaders in search at the time) were nowhere - not shareholders, not named in the agreement, nothing. Kemp made it up.
Before the Freedom of Information Act came into effect, the contract was hurriedly changed to exclude the profit-sharing clause Kemp negotiated on behalf of the British Council, and reassigned to another company, Sheffield Data Ltd. The original company, Education Websites Ltd, was renamed Remone Ltd, and an application made to have this renamed company i.e. Remone Ltd struck from the register at Companies House. Nevertheless the FOI answer from the British Council given to my enquiry as to whether the original contract had been changed was that there had been no change to the contract. Presumably they hoped that their burial job had worked. Oh dear.
All of those involved on the Council side did well: OBEs and promotions all round for the cheats and liars and a knighthood for the boss. And a fortune for the Hotcourses shareholders just before the entire Education UK edifice was finally destroyed and buried. Taxpayers? Millions down the drain. Students? What students. Schools? dropped away fast because it never worked. Education UK did much more harm than good. A monumental waste of money now lying in an unmarked grave.
After more than ten years blogging here I have pretty much given up the struggle. I – like so many others – have failed to get any justice from the org. I was once offered a bribe to go away - £10,000 (first as "expenses" which they changed to "ex gratia" when I asked "what expenses?") to drop my complaint formally offered by the “trustees” – and if I had accepted it then the BC could have pointed to that as an outcome. But I didn’t because there was no truth and no justice. The organisation lacks integrity in the same way that it lacks purpose or credibility. Yes, it has political support but, I believe, only from the effete and out of touch, the foolish and the ignorant. If there is anybody left in the real world who thinks the organisation is more than a parasite, an insult to the intelligence, feeding off the taxpayer to usurp work by genuine enterprise, to provide pointless employment purely focused on self-perpetuation, I invite them to read a newly published interview with their “Chief Information Officer”.
It’s quite long, so if you would rather just get a sample, here is an unedited excerpt.
How as CIO have you driven cultural and behaviour change in your organisation, and to what extent?
This is an area close to my heart. Our organisation is about cultural relations, about building friendly knowledge and understanding. This is something that I espouse internally, by being honest and aiming for the win-win, and modelling the behaviour that brings us closer. I have introduced business partnering, our cultural norms (humility, credible assertion and critical loyalty) and introduced global team briefing activities to bring my dispersed teams together. In our team we hit the headlines in our organisation by introducing a social media campaign on #mycontribution not only to help the team see where they fit but also to drive a step-change in how the rest of the organisation viewed the professional services. There is more to do here, but some exciting changes.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
As a former deputy DG used to say to me when I drew attention to certain shortcomings in the org, “What can I say?”.
These people are so far gone they can’t see what they have become.
Many schools now have online booking systems, some of which provide quotations. But nothing touches CoursePricer. It is fast, flexible and really powerful. Schools can build in their fee structures whether its fixed price and fixed dates or continuous enrolment with multiple start dates, graduated discounts, summer seasons etc., with optional and mandatory extras, accommodation, airport transfers etc. We launched this last week and we have around 70 schools and colleges using it already. Click here to view a selection.
What's different about CoursePricer?
Once set up on English in Britain you can easily install that calculator icon on your own site (I've put one here to illustrate the point), agent site, association site etc. where it will work with the same data at the same speed, whether link, iframe or javascript popup.
A distinguished panel of judges, including leaders and experts in the industry, journalists and academics, has chosen English in Britain from a strong entry as the 2015 winner in the Best Support Service category.
Patrick Watson as usual gets the point and expresses it beautifully, and I warmly recommend his article. The Minister Hugo Swire gently chides the Council but we are still a mile away from any sort of level playing field (the prospect of which was pretty much ruled out anyway by the Triennial Review). The British Council, as we have said before, cannot compete fairly even in the unlikely event that it actually wanted to.
And now we learn that the British Council has contracted a company called "Verita" to adjudicate in the complaints process. About six years ago I signed up to an "independent" complaints process when the chair of the British Council, Lord Kinnock, contracted a "thorough and independent investigation" from a consultant. The outcome, which took almost a year, was a charade, a disgrace; in all that time the consultant actually spoke to nobody but myself, failed to make contact with the parties about whom I was complaining, did not even mention the specific complaints made or address the pile of evidence in his report, produced no evidence of any kind from the British Council, and without credible basis offered me £10,000 in "expenses".
Even the anodyne content of that report contained fundamental errors, and during the period of its preparation the consultant, a KCMG no less, actually took paid work from the British Council. All this was pointed out to the trustees, and their response was true to form; they ignored the points made and simply confirmed the £10,000 offer (which, having taken my point that the payment could not be for expenses since none had been claimed, had now become an "ex gratia payment") in full and final settlement. Which I refused. I'm not saying that Verita can't do a better job, but a) when a judge is paid by one side and not the other it's difficult to have much confidence in the process and b) the British Council has not only for years denied acting against the interests of British organisations active in international education, but also has an appalling record of denial, obfuscation and misrepresentation when attempts have been made to make matters better.
The British Council's use of the word "independent" is, put kindly, idiosyncratic and the reality of fair competition with the British Council is the same: in the purely hypothetical case that the organisation did compete fairly, it would - being fundamentally amateurish and rather better at BS than work - cease to exist. So it can't compete fairly, and any so called "independent" process that they have contracted will be bound to play along with the British Council's own "faux-monnayeur" interpretation of that word. Hugo Swire take note.
Given that the organisation is paid generously by the British taxpayer to represent our interests, and to practise “soft diplomacy”, you wonder just how much it can get wrong. Here’s the case of a lass called Sharon who took the IELTS test through the British Council, which then failed to pass on her clearance to her selected universities as was their duty. So she took her case to her local consumer forum who recognised the justice of her case. The British Council compounded its earlier blunder by failing to show up, and in their absence the forum awarded Sharon 50,000 rupees (about £490.00). The British Council now found a way of making matters worse (and more expensive) by filing an appeal, claiming that they took Sharon’s complaint to be a legal notice – a stance which the Indian court described as “absurd”. But the Council still had one more card to play.
Much of the distress caused by this dreadful organisation derives from the fact that it is neither fish nor fowl. It presents itself as a government agency, a diplomatic body, but is really a government subsidized business, as so many of us know to our cost. On this occasion, in order to assert its self-assigned superiority to the Indian courts (not to mention poor Sharon), the British Council
“stated that being a division of the British High Commission in India, it enjoyed the status of a diplomatic mission, and thus could not be subjected to the court's jurisdiction.”
That’s the kind of line that probably went down well in Edwardian England and, no doubt, in the British Raj, but today the Indians can tell such people where to get off.
“The court responded that the council's plea was wrong, as no such document had been brought on record to show them being a division of the British High Commission, and thus they could not claim diplomatic immunity. It added that the British Council was a registered charitable trust, with the registration done according to Indian laws. Thus, after considering all the facts, the British Council's plea was rejected.”
So you can’t be a charity and a diplomatic mission at the same time, and the British need India to tell us this obvious fact. We should all, all of us, be happy about this judgement and hope that this truly absurd organisation will, post triennial review if not institutional lobotomy, start inhabiting the same world as the rest of us. And even if it can’t manage to convert into either an honest company or a true diplomatic body or a genuine charity, let’s hope that it can employ managers who show proper respect to the institutions of the country they are in, and who aren’t such bloody fools.
UPDATE:
On top of the award of 50,000 rupees the British Council were stuck with a bill for 25,000 rupees in costs (presumably not including some rather heftier fees they were paying for their own legal representation). The Tribune version of the story are quite blunt - the BC were "guilty of providing deficient services" and their plea of diplomatic status was "palpably wrong". Let's hear it for soft diplomacy.
This is a table showing the results of Google's "Pagespeed Insights" for a selection of 25 websites. Click on table to enlarge.
It was the unspeakable Blair who in 1999/2000 introduced something called the “Prime Minister’s Initiative” with a view to increasing the number of international students in Britain. The aim in this case may have been laudable even if today it looks quaint, but the execution, as with so many plums dropped into the lap of the British Council, was deeply flawed. The Council was of course very excited by the project, linking the org as it did with Downing Street, and promising, as indeed it delivered, another British Council gongfest. The lead product, the flagship of the “PMI”, was the Education UK website, of which the British Council said:
“We believe that when complete, the Education UK web site will be a valuable and effective tool for global promotions and one that will place the UK well ahead of its international competitors.”
It was never any good. Nothing worked well, and while only the English language course content was actually removed following sector protests pending some derivative revision over an extended period in 2002, other bits survived. Confronted with the reality of the site’s failures, the British Council made a virtue of its role in specifically promoting higher education, and pointed to university courses as being the main event, the principal raison d'être for the beast. And indeed the organisation enjoyed more success selling that service domestically than they managed in any other sector. But it was, as it still is, dire. Quite apart from being virtually unusable, it is completely unrepresentative of UK HE.
It’s not just the old chestnut of no profile for Oxford and Cambridge which, like it or not, are Britain’s best known universities. What about Bath, Birmingham, Durham, Imperial and Liverpool, or indeed the forty others who have chosen to abstain? Not even Glasgow Caledonian participates these days and their VP was a British Council trustee (a post which still has pride of place on her CV) and a high profile supporter of the Education UK notion. There is also no Lancaster, no Reading, no Southampton, no Strathclyde and no Wolverhampton – so many others are marked by their non-participation. And if a student should be interested in studying at one of these excellent universities and tries to find a profile for such institutions what do they get? They get zilch. Here’s Reading, for example:
University of Reading
Whiteknights House
PO Box 217
That’s it. No link to their website, no address, no email address, no phone, not even a postcode to help a lost student find their way to the uni by satnav. And yes, there’s no more either for Glasgow Caledonian. Can there ever have been a more useless service provided in our names?
But that deplorable and embarrassing failure is actually the best of Education UK. The position today is that while many UK universities apparently still subscribe to this service, the UK education sector as a whole has overwhelmingly rejected it. In plain English: UK Education rejects Education UK. Even in English language teaching, where the Council aspires to a positive reputation, Education UK has been rejected by 87% of the organisations the British Council has itself accredited. It has also been rejected by 97% of Further Education Institutions and 99% of boarding schools. That doesn’t leave much. Such a minimal level of endorsement is all but incredible given that the organisation, the British Council, is embedded in embassies and high commissions, has offices worldwide, gets millions from the taxpayer, and is the first choice of the Establishment whenever education is mentioned in an international context. To start with such an enormous monopoly advantage and then to turn it into such deplorable failure takes some doing.
And why is the Education UK site rejected? Because it’s no bloody good. Never was, never will be. It reflects badly on Britain, reveals chronic lack of confidence in the British Council and its supposed “representative” role, and as a device to represent the interests of UK Education it is manifestly not fit for purpose.
Education UK is a 14 year old car crash. Kill it.
What can we say? Disappointingly for those of us who know what dealing with the org can be like, the new man seems to have already fallen into the British Council habit of uncritical mutual congratulation. For example:
“The first thing I wanted to say was what a great place the British Council is. I have heard so many impressive things, any one of which was fabulous, never mind how good all of them collectively are. I hope you are all proud of what you achieve individually and collectively.”
Alice, pass that bag. We had all that of course from Green, Kinnock, Davidson and co, so it would be unrealistic to expect anything very new. And like everybody else in the British Council, he’s busy. Three weeks in and “forty meetings a week”, so that’s 120 meetings and counting – impressive on quantity but to judge from his conclusions above there must be a slight concern about the application of the law of diminishing returns.
Curiously, he also seems to suffer from his predecessor’s garbled English affliction:
“the office here is determined to get me out an about as soon much as possible”.
But let’s put that down to excitement.
Despite my reservations about the organisation, I will sign off by wishing him well. He has an agenda for change, and we must all hope that his critical faculties are a little sharper than he’s letting on. And that he can deliver the change required.
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Happily for the new leader, his subjects feel the same about him as he does about them. These comments are all genuine.
Very proud
Thank you for sharing your views so early in the day.
I literally jumped up and down, and cried and laughed at the same time, when I heard I was coming to work for the British Council, many many years ago. I was so proud and happy to come and work for such a fantastic organisation. And I certainly did not know then exactly how much my colleagues around the world do and accomplish every day. So I'm even prouder now. Which is why it was so good to read your words. Welcome on board and I hope you will enjoy the ride!
A Good Place with Good People |
Penning your thoughts of your first 3 weeks ( what ? 40 meetings a week !!! ) is quite an achievement and very commendable ! Moving around from Amman to Pakistan will surely give you a good ground feel of how some of these projects run. Keep moving. The Global perspective is much more. All the best and enjoy meeting BC good people.
Telling Our Story Better |
Thank you Ciaran for sharing your first impressions. As a Communicator, I can't agree more with your comment that you have heard we don't tell our story enough.
Communicating what we do - let's get personal
Many thanks for your blog. You have raised a perennial problem - how to communicate what we do. Indeed my first director when I joined many moons ago made a point of reminding me at every opportunity that it was no good doing good things, unless everyone knows about it.
Warm Welcome and great thanks |
I am really honoured to have you as our leader. You said once the great organisations you admired were British Council and John Lewis. I appreciated you told us how you were impressed by the work we did and also reflected that ‘It would be nice to think we can finish some of the projects, resist the temptation to start a few more and just give ourselves the space to learn, to improve and to build on our good work.’ I believe you will lead us to where we started and make our organisation to be an easily recognised promoter of the UK because UK is a great country and it wants to share its greatness with all the other countries in the world.
Happy New Year to all readers! This is our latest promotional video for English in Britain. It's more about style and image than substance but we like it anyway.
International Education Connect Ltd has been nominated for a British Youth Travel Award in the Best Support Service category. The winners in each category will be announced on December 4th. We're dead chuffed.
OK, so I made that up. But it is a wee bit sad that our representative taxpayer-funded (to the tune of more than half a million pounds per day) organisation, which actually does very well out of Europe by being first in line for government contracts etc., should make such a balls-up of its spelling. And before you say it was a nice idea that went wrong, the idea is old hat. The formula what is missing ("UR", you are, geddit?) has been used by non-conformist churches for years, including one I used to regularly walk past in Cambridge.
So they copied an idea from CHURCH, got it wrong and made asses of themselves. Sound familiar?
British Council version here:
It's now ten years since young Alex Tew's idea for the Million Dollar Homepage took shape and we decided to support it. His slogan at the time was "Own a piece of Internet history" and despite the hype I think that was pretty fair. I would never have thought about it had it not been for a surge in mainly north American visitors overnight from that source, so I presume the anniversary made the news channels over there. I believe a fair number of the links on that page are now dead, but Alex evidently lives on - the man behind CALM.
Published for the first time last year we record a milestone: last night we passed 25,000 downloads. We've now given the guide its own website at EnglishinBritain.guide where you can browse the guide online. There's also a public counter there.
If you are going to go somewhere, or thinking of going somewhere for a while, you like to know what things look like. And we live in a visual age, when people are as likely to send a "selfie" or other picture to friends and family, whether directly or through social media, as send an email or, gulp, a letter as once we did. So we have announced this evening another arm to our English in Britain media suite - a gallery to show students the people, places, and activities they could encounter. English in Britain subscribers can upload unlimited pictures to their albums, and have videos embedded, and I hope we will build a great library here.
The English in Britain Gallery will be found at EnglishinBritain.gallery
The British Council has always denied that it competes unfairly, and indeed it is recorded in the recent Triennial Review that “The Chair of the British Council wrote to the Review Director categorically rebutting the complaint of unfair competition” – so we have denial plus preemptive denial. However those of us who work in education and have had close relationships with the organisation know not only that the British Council competes unfairly in any number of ways, but also that the British Council, including therefore the main board, the Board of Trustees and by extension the FCO, knows full well that this is so. But that is not the most important point.
Let us imagine for a moment that the playing field was levelled and that the British Council competed on an equal basis for contracts at home and abroad. Let us assume in that scenario that diplomatic representation played no part, and that no British Council employee including staff members from the “Chief Executive” to locally employed cleaners who derived their livelihood ultimately from the British taxpayer, performed any service for the commercial arm of the organisation, and that there was no subsidy or advantage through inter-governmental cultural agreements, shared premises or local taxation arrangements or any other factor, including pensions. In other words consider the purely theoretical possibility that competition from the British Council was clearly and transparently fair. How long do you think that would last? How likely is it that they could win contracts on merit and see off organisations founded on expertise such as CfBT, Pearson or Orbital Education, or professional educational publishing houses? The British Council has a long history of cocking things up (who else remembers English for Oman, English for Yemen, the ECCTIS 2000 database, their mess with Education UK and so on?). It is a history which has made them adept at denial, obfuscation and cover-up, and made them keen at every opportunity to play the diplomatic, charitable, public service card.
With the purpose of the organisation unclear (“We found little evidence that the current statement of purpose …had resonance outside the organisation”), the org points to its commercial success. But how has the outfit managed to grow its earnings so significantly? Its fee income has almost doubled in real terms over the past ten years (from about £275 million to £500 million) – which in international education is pretty smart work. So hands up if you believe that is because the British Council employs so many leading experts and crack managers that success is inevitable? And hands up if you think it might be something to do with queue-jumping, governmental and diplomatic contacts, snapping up contracts that never go to tender and other cosy deals, using grant-funded staff for commercial advantage, double dealing with UK companies, resources (financial and human) migrating from grant to commerce, and of course government branding? The question is rhetorical, or what in common parlance is known as a no-brainer. My contention is simply this: that for the British Council loss of unfair advantage in their commercial dealings would be nothing short of catastrophic.
What does this mean in the context of the recommendations of the Triennial Review? Well, to start with the TR hands the British Council a degree of unfair advantage on a plate when it says
We conclude that the British Council is indeed in a beneficial position in its relations with host governments by virtue of its extensive and long-standing networks but note that achieving such a position is part of its core purpose. While that can be seen as providing an unfair advantage over other UK commercial competitors, the Review does not believe that it would bring overall benefit to the UK and UK businesses to undermine the British Council’s advantageous network of relationships, but rather that that network needs to work for the benefit of all UK providers and that competition is as fair as possible.
i.e. we acknowledge that use of its contacts for commercial purposes isn’t fair, but we don’t want to have to make the only decision that could both support the networks and ensure fairness, which would be to resolve that the British Council stays out and, in a professional and disinterested manner, publicly notifies the UK companies and institutions most likely to benefit the client, and so help UK business, which pays for it. So it won’t happen. The likeliest outcome of this Triennial Review exercise is therefore that the BC will do what they are best at – prevaricate, obstruct and obfuscate in order maximally to dilute the TR recommendations and hang on to every bit of unfair competitive advantage that they can. That may sound cynical but in truth it is not. It will happen because it is absolutely vital if the British Council is to survive as what they like to call an “entrepreneurial public service”.
Take away the buoyancy provided by unfair competition, and the British Council ship will sink like a stone.
British businesses working in international education have a particular grievance with the British Council in that the taxes they pay are used by government to undermine them, and that will remain a burning issue until the practice stops and the British Council is reined in. But we should not forget that the subsidies paid by the British taxpayer undermine local business overseas, and not just in developed countries. Below is a letter we published eight years ago, and I commend it to your attention as it demonstrates the reality behind the rhetoric of the Council "building trust". The fact is that the British Council generates the same kind of resentment and damage overseas as it does here. Article follows:
As readers who have followed Levant Education’s progress in the past couple of years will know, we have continually faced an unethical, unfair competitor that has gone after the business that we established in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iraq, Kurdistan.
At every step, the British Council acted as a supportive ‘charity’, only to then exploit the business opportunities we created with the ‘help’ of UK government agencies.
We are far from seeing an end to the unfair business practices, the abuse of taxpayer funding, the commercial exploitation of government offices, the tax avoidance, and exploitation of private businesses that go to the British government for assistance with international market penetration…but this is a step in the right direction.
Levant Education and companies all over the UK will continue to campaign for a fair crack at international education business that for years now has been cherry picked (or stolen) by the British Council.
Today the news of the Triennial Review, together with some commentary, was published on “Education Investor” which includes a selection of quotes from the report, and commentary from Patrick Watson of Montrose Associates, Sir Vernon Ellis who is chair of the British Council, and from yours truly. I trust Education Investor will not take me to be in breach of copyright if I reproduce the comments here: my point is that the comments demonstrate precisely why the British Council needs a new model of governance and leadership.
First, the comments:
Patrick Watson of Montrose Public Affairs welcomed the review. “There have always been concerns expressed by education providers directly to ministers that the British Council operates with a unfair advantage in the market.
“Providers have been unsure of the rules of engagement – when is the council working with them in partnership to promote British education interests, and when is it competing with them to secure commercial deals for itself.”
David Blackie, managing director of International Education Connect, which runs the course listings site English in Britain, said the review was "not radical enough to satisfy those who the council competes with", but a “step in the right direction”. “If the recommendations are carried out and acted upon with zeal there will be a new culture within the organisation,” he said.
Sir Vernon Ellis, chair of the British Council said: “We agree that our significant growth and the increased importance and complexity of our relations with government and other stakeholders has given rise to a number of important issues that need to be addressed.”
Compare and contrast. The two outsiders here are concerned about unfair competition, lack of clarity about the role of the organisation and the need for change, while the insider refers to “important issues” arising from the organisation’s “increased importance” vis-à-vis government. Has anybody really expressed concerns about increased importance? A keyword search in the report for “unfair competition” reveals that Sir Vernon wrote to the review director with a specific rebuttal of the notion of unfair competition. Why do you imagine he would do that? So let us at least eliminate this latest attempt at obfuscation. The important issues that need to be addressed are not (for heaven’s sake) a function of any “increased importance”, and despite the British Council Chair’s choice of language, are nothing new and are not of recent development. The ingrained problems lie in the habits of secrecy, obfuscation, narrow self-interest, misrepresentation and the use of multiple privileges to ensure a tilted playing field – a.k.a. unfair competition – wherever the organisation senses that there’s money to be made.
The FCO Triennial Review gets it. At some point the British Council trustees have to get it too.