The Language Business

The Ongoing Student Visa Mess

So there’s going to be another review - “a thorough evaluation” of the student visa system led by Damian Green, the Immigration Minister. The headline is that 300,000 students have been admitted to this country in the past year. That could, of course, have been a stunning success story – in a Blair regime the British Council would be crowing that they had exceeded their targets under the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”, and generally trying to take the credit for something that has always been outside their control and where, insofar as they have had any influence, the net result of their efforts can only have been negative (we surely do not have to tell any reader of this blog, in or out of the British Council, how utterly hopeless the “Education UK” website is, and has always been, as a device to help international students or anybody else find useful information about UK study). Just as Gordon Brown, ex officio sponsor of the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”, was before the election crowing about having reduced international student numbers by 60,000, and just as Phil Woolas boasted on television of closing down hundreds of bogus colleges, when in fact numbers were up and Phil was fantasizing (how many did you really close down, Phil?), the worry is that student numbers are perceived as a problem, and that we have another government that does not have the energy or the will to understand the situation, except as a function of the xenophobic vote.  

It would be nice to think that Damian Green’s review is going to get to grips with student visa issues in Britain’s best interests, but his premise is unpromising. Note the opening stance “We are committed to attracting the brightest and best to Britain…”. The most active universities, colleges and schools in international student recruitment will necessarily refer to the excellence of their resources, and the quality of their education, the value of their degrees and so on, and it is right and proper that they should. But realistically few are seeking out “the brightest and the best”, but rather they are looking for students who will pay the full fees and so help the universities and colleges balance their budgets. Students do not apply to universities in the UK because they, the students, are “the brightest and the best”, but because they believe that Britain can offer them the best education, and because they can afford to pay. It’s a completely different point. Britain is engaged in a major international education competition, and that competition is for business. The competition is worth a great deal of money – billions of pounds to the UK economy. Our country has all but forgotten how to manufacture, and its economy has increasingly depended on rising property prices, on retail (mainly selling imports) and on financial services to keep the wolf from the door. But property is frothy, financial services has been a mess, and retail is struggling. Education is one thing this country does well, and we do not need politicians to threaten the education industry. We do not need posturing about “the brightest and the best” – there have always been institutions in Britain and elsewhere that cater for those who may be academically ordinaire but who have the money to make the best of what they’ve got – we need politicians to understand that Britain has worked hard and is accordingly well placed in the international education business, and that it is an industry which makes an important, vital, contribution to the national economy. Yes, there are other benefits in terms of the value to Britain’s own students, and in terms of  Britain’s standing as these internationals rise to positions of influence in commerce and politics. But the first thing to get right is the business, and to understand the benefits that this vital industry brings in terms of employment, invisible exports and general prosperity to the UK.  

The politicians’ job is to create proper systems for checking visas against admissions to genuine institutions, to verify that the money is paid for the courses booked and is available for living expenses, to check visa nationals in and out of the country, and to create optimal conditions to enable Britain’s greatest post-industrial success story to flourish. That means fostering the industry and encouraging students, all students, to choose Britain.

Montpellier again

This time another school - Institut Linguistique Adenet - with some very pleasant music from The Just Desserts.

Occitanian interlude

I was lucky enough to be invited to do some work in Montpellier recently and spent a week there making videos for three different language schools. This is one of them.

An injection of common sense

In February we reported on the decision of our “boneheaded government” to link the eligibility of visa nationals to study English with their proficiency in English. Not only was it patently stupid to make the assessment that students with limited English were more likely to be illegal, but the decision to stop students who needed to learn English at the border threatened the livelihoods of many businesses and teachers in the UK.

The ruling was challenged by English UK and was quashed in the High Court. Tony Millns, chief executive of English UK, said the ruling had saved jobs and millions of pounds a year in foreign earnings.

"This judgment upholds our basic case that the Home Secretary was wrong to introduce a substantive change... without laying that change before Parliament.”

While the judgment concerns only the method by which the Draconian change was introduced, and the new government has yet to decide whether it will implement something similar using proper parliamentary procedure (surely not), the court ruling is a step in the right direction. And very good news. Well done English UK, well done the courts, well done common sense.

British Council Tree Planters Smash World Record

 
We have remarked before on the astonishing capacity of the British Council to plant trees. They do this faster than they can dream up a puff about themselves, get a new screw out of government, undermine a business or wangle a tax break.

How can I be so certain? Well just look at this headline. Last time we were marvelling at the organisation’s reported ability to plant 15,000 trees in a day. Pah! Starting in August, the article says, in just two years they are going to plant 30 million trees. 30 million. Now, even the most dedicated climate change champion or diversity manager or good governance advisor has to have some time off in order to get their holiday entitlement, enjoy the local sights, attend functions, do a bit of global warming and be seen to be doing something in their offices, so let’s say they spend 500 days over the next two years planting trees. If they do, that’s – let me see – 60,000 trees a day, say 5000 an hour, or one every 0.72 of a second, or 83.3 trees a minute.

So, all you sceptics out there who wonder what on earth the BC is for, take on board this statistic: in the time it takes Usain Bolt to run 100 meters, the British Council can plant 14 trees. Good or what?

They may be hopeless at everything else, but when it comes to tree-planting, or just plain bullshit, the British Council is in a league of its own.

10 reasons for cutting the British Council

1. It is unnecessary.
2. It pretends to be a charity, but is paid for by the taxpayer.
3. It pretends to be a business, but could not trade without public subsidy.
4. It leeches money for itself from people worldwide under diplomatic cover.
5. It increases public expenditure, and simultaneously reduces the tax take.
6. It epitomises old fashioned privilege and hypocrisy.
7. It does nothing well and does not understand, still less value, expertise.
8. It does some things so badly that simply its absence would be of immediate and tangible benefit.
9. It is unmanaged, undemocratic and unaccountable.
10. It is an absurd, corrupt and embarrassing anachronism.

The options are:

A) Drop the sponsorship, the diplomatic status, the civil service pensions etc and turn it into a private company.

B) Drop the sponsorship, the diplomatic status etc, and let it work as a genuine charity independent of government support (no taxpayer sponsorship, no closed public contracts, no civil service pensions, no use of government buildings at home or abroad) as required by charity law

C) Drop the figleaf of the "arm's length" formula and make it official. Keep whatever is deemed to be worth keeping as the "cultural arm of Britain's foreign policy" as part of the FCO, and make it drop completely its subsidised interference in markets at home and abroad

D) Withdraw the support of the public purse and just see what happens

E) Pass the entire burden of the organisation to a company that is looking for good global PR and which is already a sponsor through BC Trading International Ltd. Such as BP.

The Labours of a New Government

Hansard records a spat in 2001 between Peter Bottomley MP and Clare Short, then Secretary of State for the DFID, over what the British Council is/was.

Mr. Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West): It is an aid organisation.
Clare Short: No, it is not.

Short was right, and Bottomley wrong. Perhaps Mr Bottomley really did think the British Council was an aid organisation. If so, that must be something to do with the fact that for the previous three years his wife Virginia Bottomley had been Vice Chair of the British Council. In other words a senior Conservative MP married to the British Council VC thought that for the previous three years his wife had been working for an aid organisation. So it’s also reasonable to think that she thought so too. I mean, they were both MPs so one might suppose that they sometimes talked about such things. Perhaps there are at this moment British Council trustees, (and they have shown many signs of being completely out of touch), who also imagine that the British Council is an aid organisation.

Well, the new International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell has announced the establishment of a watchdog to ensure greater transparency in how British aid money, taxpayers’ money, is used, and to get better value for money. So how will the British Council sidestep this one? It is used to getting closed contracts with DFID such as training the benighted Africans in good governance - while the organisation itself remains a bastion of privilege, undemocratic, a supreme example of non-accountability, and a nest of corruption. So Clare got them off that aid organisation hook, and the Bottomleys, who have probably just spent rather too many years in Parliament or Worthing or something, were (and presumably still are) just a bit potty and out of touch.

But of course Clare was wrong too. In her spat with Peter B she described the British Council as “the cultural arm of British foreign policy”. But as we all know, the British Council is a registered charity, and you really can’t be an arm of British foreign policy if you are a charity, any more than the FCO or the army. So she must have been talking nonsense too. And speaking as one who has a small business which has spent 8 years battling with the British Council, I can record unequivocally that the British Council’s role in its dealings with me has been nothing, but nothing, to do with British foreign policy, or aid, or charity, and everything to do with lining its own pockets by whatever means, and using its vast array of privileges to support unfair competition. 

The new watchdog is welcome. But what we really need is one which will nail the buggers down. Such a task really ought to be less than Herculean.

Now where exactly is my elbow?

We learn that the British Council have appointed a company to extend (or possibly expand) the Education UK brand. I don’t suppose we will see Education UK trainers or 3G phones, but I imagine we are condemned to see this wretched “brand” appearing in places where we might have hoped to avoid it.

Why so negative? Because Education UK is associated with failure, with lack of professionalism, with inadequacy, with poor planning and poorer implementation. It is the dysfunctional child of a shotgun marriage between Number 10 and the British Council that took place 10 years ago, and in those ten years it has pushed itself to the fore and advertised its failings to the world at large, to the detriment of the interests of British international education, and to a mixture of bewilderment and contempt in international students.

You think I exaggerate? Never mind the disastrous 8 years from 2002 to 2010. We now have a new Education UK site, if possible even worse than the old one. Visit Education UK yourself now, and imagine you are a parent looking for a suitable boarding school for your child. Try it. Boarding schools are invited to pay £1750.00 for this travesty. After you have tried that, give one good reason why the Education UK “brand” should be expanded, and let us all know. Now try looking for a degree course in Central England in Marine Biology. Now look for a Home Tuition course in English in Scotland. And so on.

They have cleaned up some of the misinformation, but about three months after opening the site, it still reads “As an international student in the UK you can work up to 20 hours a week in term-time.” That is true only if the visa was applied for before 3rd March this year. It is no longer true, and putting that statement on the home page of this site, which aspires to official status, is both sloppy and irresponsible. Seriously irresponsible when you consider how vital this factor is to so many students.

And now Tayburn, the design company, have been roped in to do what they can to make this sow’s ear look like a silk purse, and expand it. The attempt is as vain as it is wasteful. But then that is precisely what the brand is all about.

Another round with the Russians

William Hague wants to normalise relations with the Russians, and I’m sure that goes for most of us and most of them, so let’s hope that the diplomats can move ahead on that one. And let’s hope too that the British Council doesn’t foul it up. It will perhaps come as a surprise to the British Establishment, but the Muscovites have somehow got by without the services of the British Council for quite a while now, just as the populations of nine other cities in Russia got by after the British Council unilaterally closed their offices there quite a long time before anybody had heard of Litvinenko. Could the people manage in Moscow without the British Council’s teaching operation? Well, EF have 17 schools in Moscow and they seem to have managed without any tax or diplomatic crisis. So, unless the British Council are going to compete on a level playing field with local enterprise, the best thing is surely that they should keep out, and everybody will be better off, especially bilateral commercial relationships between the British and the Russians.

The Russians had problems, you may remember, with the legal status of the British Council (and briefly with a non-breathalysed British Council director). They are not the only ones. The Russians were uncomfortable that a commercial operation, no doubt remitting money to London through diplomatic channels, appeared on their territory under diplomatic cover and that this commercial operation assumed that not only could it retain diplomatic status, but also that it need not pay Russian taxes. My argument is not dissimilar. I am “uncomfortable” (sickened) that an organisation that has all this institutional and financial support from government and the taxpayers should be allowed to go into competition with my independent taxpaying company, having adopted a cloned product for our identical market. And that this organisation, which could not possibly exist without the “sponsorship” of the FCO, should be allowed to call itself a “charity”. Problems with the legal status? You bet.

The reality of politics is likely to mean that the Russians, like the Koreans or the Spaniards and others who have had similar problems, will eventually allow the parasite to continue to feed on their territory, as elsewhere, because they can’t separate out this government agency from the others identified in their treaty arrangements. The fundamental injustice may – for a while at least - be laid to rest there, but it won’t be here.

British Council Gravy Train

The London Evening Standard has revealed that the “Chief Executive” of the British Council, Martin Davidson, claimed £4600 in hotel expenses last year for overnight stays in London. Where he works. This is, we are given to understand, because his duties, such as attending concerts, mean that it’s a bit of a chore going home to Dorset. Now I expect most of us can sympathise with someone not wanting to make a long trip home after a late evening, but what has that got to do with the price of fish? He chooses to live in Dorset and work in London, and so it is for him to pick up the expense and inconvenience as well as the pleasures of the life style he has chosen for himself.

The paper reveals too that Mr Davidson collects a salary of £169,363 (plus expenses). That salary is about £25,000 higher than that of any Cabinet minister, with the single exception of the Prime Minister. How on earth did such an absurdity come about? He works for the British Council for heaven’s sake. This is not a man who has fought his way through industry, or through public life, or anything except the airless corridors of the British Council, where success is largely a function of puff, spin and deceit. He’s been spared any risk or accountability and soon he will collect a KCMG for supposed “public service” and eventually retire and his generous pension will also be paid for by the taxpayer.

If you look at the rates of pay for charity chief executives you will find a few which exceed £100,000 and that will certainly be, as with Macmillan, Cancer Research UK etc, because of their success in raising money in voluntary contributions (and even then they fall well short of British Council emoluments). But this individual doesn’t need to raise money from people because the Exchequer does it for him through taxation. He doesn’t need to lift a finger and he has never had to garner a single vote from anyone. There can be no justification for this.

“Charitable” donations to the British Council come from a limited company “BC Trading International Ltd”. This for profit company pays no tax because of its generosity in giving all its profits to charity. The company is wholly owned by the British Council, which is also the charitable beneficiary. And why does this branch of government/ quango/ charity/ business own a limited company and indulge in this fiddle? Because the way it raises money is disgraceful and could not be tolerated in an organisation which claims official status in Britain as the nation’s cultural relations organisation; essentially it sells access to Britain’s diplomatic network to international companies such as Xerox, Air India, Hilton Hotels, British Aerospace, Renault and Deutsche Bank. It can do this because its sole shareholder is itself parasitically dependent on Britain’s diplomatic network.

And of course the British Council operates “commercially”; in short it uses its enormous taxpayer-funded resources, and its official diplomatic and charitable status, to suppress or knock out competition in the areas where it wishes to sell its services. And, as we can see, pays itself grotesque amounts of money, including expenses for hotel nights when going home is too much of a chore. Organisations, like fish, rot from the head. And the British Council has been rotten at the top for far, far too long.

City of the Tribes

It was my good fortune to be engaged in Galway a few days ago, and here's a 2 minute video made at the Galway Cultural Institute.

The "broken political system"

So much depends on trust. We trust friends, family, neighbours. We trust the supermarket, the post office and public transport. We trust suppliers of goods and services to provide what we pay for. In an imperfect world that trust can sometimes be challenged, but the default position has to be that we trust because we know that the alternative is inertia or conflict. Politicians have routinely used our money purely for their own ends, and have broken that trust.

The day of reckoning is upon us. The last government has also left the public finances in a parlous state. Turning them around will not be easy, not least because there are now so many people in the population who are, by virtue of being unproductive, dependent on the diminishing number of those in the productive sector who, in effect, foot the bill. Worryingly it is not simply that the country has been living beyond its means, the problem is structural and deep-rooted.

The British Council is the epitome of the structural problem I refer to. If all power has a tendency to corrupt, there can be few places where this tendency is more evident than in this organisation. It is a bastion of serious privilege, and unaccountable. It is no good pointing to the trustees of this “charity”, or the parliamentary committees that selectively review the representations of this government department, as if they provided adequate scrutiny. Which one of those are we talking about anyway? The notion that an organisation can be at one and the same time an arm of government (as it is, and there are numerous quotations from Miliband and Brown and others to prove it) and a registered charity, as it also is, is outrageous. Because it is both, it is also neither. But the anomaly and the outrage do not end there.

The British Council is a menace to genuine enterprise at home and abroad. Why do universities and colleges and schools sign up for the “Education UK Partnership”? Why can the organisation operate language schools in Paris or Seoul or Maputo? Why can they land exclusive contracts to teach at universities in Libya? The answer is of course because of their grotesque and corrupting privilege, and the consequent denial of fairness and opportunity to others. They could not and cannot compete on a level playing field. They operate “diplomatically” abroad and avoid taxes, and operate “charitably” at home and so avoid taxes. They have a massive subsidy from the taxpayer in addition to substantial closed gifted contracts, and publicly funded pensions. In such ways they are provided with a raft of public money on which they and all their deeply uncompetitive commercial activities depend.

They also have a wholly owned subsidiary limited company, which can therefore earn money in ways which do not accord with their Royal Charter (should “Britain’s cultural relations organisation” have sponsorship from, say, Air India, Xerox, Marriott Hotels, Renault or Deutsche Bank? What do you think?). This for profit company doesn’t pay tax because it donates all its profits to charity - and you can surely work out which charity that is. Not long ago one of the present trustees of the “charity” was also simultaneously a director of this for profit company (and also at this time appointed the British Council Finance Director to the board of another company of which he was chairman, which then was give a substantial grant from the British Council). This is the organisation that has it all – the privileges of a charity, the privileges of government, the privileges of unregulated subsidised commerce, the privileges of owning a profitable limited company that pays no tax, the privileges of secure and subsidised employment, all without risk, without downside and without scrutiny. And so riddled with moral hazard and corruption. And I haven’t yet mentioned incompetence: can there, for example, be anybody who has signed up for the Education UK website in the past 8 years because they thought it was good? The question is rhetorical.

Even that is not enough. I refer above to the tendency of power to corrupt, and there are many who have written to me over the years with their stories of incidents and examples. That is because I have written here of my experiences with the British Council – their duplicity in seeking to undermine my business when nominally in partnership, their deceit in organising meetings with my client base to persuade them to desert my services for theirs while I was fully committed to supplying them, and their long distance policy of denial and cover-up. Even when, finally, the trustees were formally involved, the British Council acted in bad faith and produced a late one-sided report that evaded the substantive issues and had no content, contribution or even comment which could be attributable to the British Council.

The British Council flits about describing itself as Britain’s cultural relations organisation, with a convenient and vacuous circular definition of cultural relations as being whatever it does. Its construct is without integrity, and so therefore is its management, and what it does. And what it does, at home and abroad, is to take the bread from the mouths of those who do not share their subsidies and their privileges. It is part of, and exists as evidence of, the broken political system. If that is to be fixed, then this parasitical organisation should be first in line for closure. Meanwhile do not trust.

What's a region?

In 2002, in order to try and keep some shred of credibility with the English language sector in the UK, the British Council ditched their failed website and built an entirely new one based on an established market-leading model. Except that they couldn’t make it work, and until a couple of months ago the English language course search on Education UK was an ongoing embarrassment to the EFL sector and to British expertise, and got in the way of students who were actually researching UK courses. 

Now the British Council has a “completely new” Education UK website. Next week, at the English UK AGM, the British Council was to have made a presentation of its brave new website (see Wednesday at 11.20 on the programme), but the anger and outrage expressed by the membership of English UK has caused the British Council to pull out rather than face up to the humiliating truth of its ingrained, consistent and ongoing failure to represent the interests of our English language teaching sector.

I am not going to make an analysis of the site here – acorrespondent has already pointed out how the BC seems to be using this blog as a bugtracking resource (boarding schools are now included, missing information is now present, you can actually find an institution that offers a history degree in Wales, you can request information from course results etc). But it’s still bloody awful.

Let’s take the matter of regions of the United Kingdom. How do you divide the UK up into manageable chunks for, in this case, educational purposes? In 2002 the British Council abruptly rejected the regional model they launched with (essentially based on counties; I suppose somebody pointed out that for most overseas students “Yorkshire” wouldn’t be very recognisable, and Rutland, Avon, Gwynneth and Lothian less so) and adopted instead the model that we were using at the time on English in Britain, with England divided into Northern, Central, London and Southern. And despite the fact that UCAS uses a different regional model for universities, and that Visitbritain also has a quite similar version to UCAS based on 9 English regions plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the BC has stuck with the now dated and rather lumpy regional arrangements that we rejected in 2002 just as the British Council adopted them.

   
British Council watchers will know that things don’t quite end there. The British Council has web pages for lots of countries in the world. These include, for example, France, Nigeria, Turkey, Canada. They include Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. But not England. Their reluctance to recognise the entity known as England (still recognisable at home and abroad from the odd song, football match or history book, and that language of course) extends to their indications about where to study in the regions of the UK.

Scroll down to the bottom of the Education UK home page, and you’ll see listed there the United Kingdom’s three “regions”. Three? Depending on how you count them, there are either 4 (see the Union Flag), or 7 (see the Education UK map), or 10 (see the map on English in Britain) or 12 (see UCAS and VisitBritain) or 96 (those counties again) regions in the UK. While many would accept at a pinch that 7 has some validity, most would agree that one number that doesn’t work – whether we are talking about countries or regions (and it’s fair to say that Scotland – like England and Wales - is happier about being referred to as a country than as a UK region), or zones of any kind - is 3.

That TV debate

I didn't record it, and I can't seem to find a place where it was recorded. But did I not hear Gordon Brown say, as evidence of the government's control of immigration, that Britain will have 40,000 fewer students this year? And that was supposed to be a plus point? Where is the merit in Britain having fewer students? And does that crass statement not underline the points we have repeatedly made about political interference in international education, and specifically about the dire "Prime Minister's Initiative" (and the egregious role of the appalling "British Council")? The declared purpose of "PMI" and "PMI2" was to get those numbers up, and we have now have a prime minister seeking re-election on the basis that he is bringing them down. What a sorry mess. What a misunderstanding of what Britain does well. What a failure to support a major contributor to the economy in post-industrial Britain. What a bunch of losers. What a betrayal.

[Edit: What the PM actually said was "40,000 less students this year I suspect because of our tightening of visa controls". Some achievement.]

The Education UK Paradigm

A new Education UK website went up last week. This new site was to show us, as you may recall, “a completely different way of looking at life and study in the UK”. I have been told many times that I have given far too much help to the British Council already, so this time I’ll give only a little. 

Let’s start with a small piece of good news: Education UK has dropped any pretence that it can provide a service to the boarding school sector. It is an important part of the country’s international education provision, but the sector has had the very good sense not to pay for the abominable service offered by the British Council for the past 8 years, and so there was no point in continuing to hassle them. If the site had dropped the other sectors where better provision also exists elsewhere it would have been further improved of course, but that was perhaps too much to hope.

So what have we got? You open up with a picture of what I believe to be a tropical butterfly on to whose wings our environmentally sensitive cultural representatives have crassly chalked “UK”. This crude idea (would we like to see this or any other nonsense chalked on to a Red Admiral or a Meadow Brown, or any species native to the British Isles?) provides a laboured platform for their “where ideas take flight” strapline. I think that must be the bit that is completely new. Otherwise there are links to information or disinformation (see the picture) together with embarrassing and patronising lines such as “you can think for yourself, make your own decisions”. 

Setting aside the tiresome imagery and the vacuous commentary, what about the functionality? Look on the right hand side of the screen where you will find the “Search for inspiration” box, the “My Personal” section and the course search. “You have not bookmark any page yet” it permanently and ungrammatically advises, “you need to be logged into save your shortlist and a lot more”. I would like to hope nobody is paying for this copy. Some hope.  

Last year I made a number of videos about how Education UK performed a disservice to UK institutions, and one of these took Loughborough University as a worked example. That video demonstrated how a search for a course on Physical Education on Education UK failed to include Loughborough, an institution which is justly famous for exactly that. On the new site a search for Physical Education does indeed find Loughborough.  Hurrah. But the first course to be listed for Loughborough University when I made the search just now was “Engineering Physics”. Even in the unlikely event that our putative Physical Education student was interested in such a course, and so clicked where it says “course detail”, there is no course detail. It is, in other words, worse than useless. And so to our conclusion: Education UK is a paradigm for the British Council.

British Council: another wheeze

If we accept that the British Council - at once, in the words of the Foreign Secretary, part of the “FCO family”, and a registered charity, and some sort of official British cultural relations body - should also be joint owner of IELTS with a strong financial incentive to push that examination, then we should not be surprised that they should want to increase enrolments.

According to Zeenews this is against a backdrop of falling numbers of Indians taking the exam. To counter the trend, the British Council has announced a scholarship scheme under which 8 students will each get 3 lakh, about £4500, to study overseas. This was announced by Kevin McLaven, First Secretary, Education Services, British High Commission. So somebody is evidently putting up about £36,000 to promote IELTS in India. Actually it’s a bit more than that, because the Punjab Newsline says that they are doing something similar in three other Asian countries, making a total investment of £60,000.

But exactly who is actually putting up the money for this scheme, as announced by the British High Commission in India? If you think who pays for the British High Commission in India, you’ll get the answer. Ah, you may say, but at least this money will go towards British universities. Think again. Not only is this initiative everything to do with the familiar model of the British Council using its official status and taxpayers’ money to boost its own revenues, it is also nothing to do with British universities.

“Elaborating  further the IELTS chief said that Award winners would begin a full time post-graduate programme at any overseas university which uses IELTS as a part of its admission requirements and as a reliable measure of English language proficiency. Since IELTS is accepted by over 6,000 institutions in 125 countries worldwide, university choice is wide.”

Right. So “the British High Commission” in India is putting up scholarship money as a stunt to increase IELTS enrolments. And the scholarship money, our money, may be spent in any of 125 countries worldwide.

To be fair, you can understand the British Council’s position. Given the problems faced by British institutions as a result of British government machinations over student visas, it’s probably a lot easier to send those students to other countries than to send them here.

Mind you, if Vishal Basin the British Council “Head India Examination Projects” is to be believed, and 14,000 institutions have been closed in the last year, we may soon not have any left at all.

PS. Does anybody know if any colleges have actually been closed? I found a reference to the dodgy sounding “Cambridge College of Learning” being closed on the web, but since it is still being advertised on long-term British Council partner site Hotcourses, and on Whatuni, both belonging to the Shadow Culture Secretary, that can’t be right, can it?

The Curse of Education UK

We have already highlighted some of the dire failings of the Education UK site. As a simple verification, try the summer course search: choose a month and a region and see how you do. For example choose Wales and see how many courses you get in Wales. Or Scotland, or Northern Ireland etc. This page is the representative shop window for Britain’s summer courses from our official taxpayer-funded national cultural relations organisation, on a site which the British Council tells us is used by millions of students. So it is a little disturbing that it is quite so useless.

The British Council excuse is presumably that after 8 years they are finally replacing their hopeless site with something else, for which we’ve already had a few fanfares, and so they doubtless reason that there’s no need to fix something that is old and rotten anyway. 

The organisation generally, and for good reasons, wants you to look at their promises rather than at their record. So we are now promised “a completely different way of looking at life and study in the UK”, illustrated by a picture the British Council is evidently very attached to. Not only has this picture been selected to accompany their new website announcement, and been chosen for their pre-launch sample pages, but it has also been on the Education UK Scotland page for the past few years. So I suppose that must be what people look like in Scotland.

Completely different.

Sauce for the goose

You may have read of the position on the BBC taken by Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Culture Secretary, who, in the context of the BBC getting too big, said yesterday:

“Will the BBC be less expansionist? Will it think carefully about its impact on the independent sector?”

Good question, Jeremy. But, hang on a minute – is it not Jeremy’s own company which, for almost 9 years, has had the exclusive contract in respect of a principal website belonging to another state monopoly? I refer of course to the Education UK website of the British Council. That contract was awarded by the British Council in 2001 and (by one means or another) the contract has remained within Hotcourses’ domain ever since.

As we now know a new Education UK website contract has been awarded by the British Council to Sapient, so there's a change of sorts. But the contract to sell the British Council’s services in respect of this new site has evidently gone (in competitive tender? or just over lunch?) to Hotcourses Ltd, Jeremy’s company, so perhaps he’ll be a beneficiary of closed contracts with a state monopoly for another 9 years to come.

The benefits are clear. On the one hand Hotcourses Ltd will continue to keep a hold on an area in which they have at least squatters’ rights (alongside an embarrassing record of failure), and on the other hand the British Council, who are clearly not bothered about whether something is a success or a failure, will maintain a “sweet” spot for their money-making monopolies in government if the Conservatives win the next election. Neat.

I'm wondering if the BBC might not sort out its problems with the Conservatives by having a quiet word with the people at the British Council.

Double whammy? The return of VAT

The new visa restrictions and the sledgehammer methodology of the UKBA have been deeply unsettling for the EFL industry in the UK, and even cataclysmic for some. It’s nothing to with EFL, but you can see why the politicos are getting jumpy if you watch last night’s Newsnight. It’s really shocking. It’s also – I think – disturbing that Phil Woolas talks about “closing down” colleges, when they are rather obviously still open; he means taking them off the UKBA register – but who in the general public would have understood that? The people in the piece are criminals, and should be under arrest.

But another threat has emerged – one which most schools will have thought was dead and buried. I am no VAT advisor, but this is what I understand. The issue is that w.e.f. January 1st this year the place of supply of most services becomes the place where the customer of the service belongs. Thus, since EFL providers are customers of overseas agents, their introductory services are now deemed to be supplied in the UK. Since these agents are unlikely to register for VAT in the UK (and so add VAT to their invoices), something called the “reverse charge” procedure applies, meaning that the customer, the EFL provider – if VAT registered - adds this to the invoice and pays the VAT on the agents’ behalf, and either gets it back or not depending on the services they provide.

So no problem if you’re not VAT registered? Not exactly. Since agents’ commission is now (as I understand) vatable, then in the event that the levels of commission payable reach £68,000 in a year, VAT registration becomes obligatory, and registered schools will then have to pay VAT on the commissions. Net invoicing may well be a partial way round, but may well not apply to all transactions. So, from where I sit, the light is flashing amber. With a bit of luck I've got this wrong. Any views out there?

Empowerment, Enhancement and Eradication

Another British Council library is closing, this time in Mauritius. This is announced under the Orwellian heading “Professional Development Services in Mauritius” Under the same announcement on the Mauritius home page it says “Our next challenge is to work actively in the development of a 'learning culture', empowering us all to make use of every medium independently and effectively.” Which I think is a coded way of saying “don’t count on us”.  

Certainly that’s what the Mauritians seem to think. Under the heading “BC Library RIP” on a local Internet news service page there is a singularly depressing assessment of British achievements there: 

Just displaying a number of books on the shelves and waiting for big crowds to turn up for them is hardly the way to encourage reading.

But the British here have always been known for their couldn't-care-less attitude ever since they took the island over from the French in 1810.

Fortunately our chaps do a lot more than that of course. Apart from empowerment through closure, the British Council in Mauritius will also be working “to eradicate the negative forces of climate change” and of course “enhancing dialogue between cultures”. Bless. It's probably them at work in the picture.