It’s only a taster rather than an in-depth study (how much more do I have to do for them?) but it reveals how institutions in Wales are short-changed by the British Council’s Education UK web site. It also shows what it is like to use the “official” British international student recruitment site that comes with the support of the Prime Minister, and has enjoyed this support, and caused such immense frustration, for 8 years. For almost all of that period the Chair of the British Council was Lord Kinnock who is of course a Welshman.

If you have watched our videos about Loughborough and Glasgow Caledonian, you may not wish to view another in the same vein (even if it has one or two new angles). But just as we chose Glasgow Caledonian because the Principal and Vice-Chancellor is a British Council trustee, and therefore really needs to do something about the mess, this time we have chosen a university whose VC is the Universities UK representative on the Education UK Partnership board, and it would seem she has a duty to sort this out for the other two universities (and the 300 or whatever it is other HE institutions) as well as her own. There are plenty more examples if you scroll down through this blog.

It is something of a disgrace that an official, government-funded organisation should put forward this third rate service in our names, with our money, to the exclusion of professional services, and be allowed to pretend that it is actually helping international student recruitment, when plainly it is just getting in the way. British educational institutions would do well to cut off the inflated payments demanded by the British Council for its services, which are in any case purely a function of its taxpayer funded network, and it really should not be allowed to ask for any more money anyway.

 
On January 29th 2002, almost 8 years ago, the British Council was very disturbed. It realised that the launch of their Education UK website, a direct and high profile result of the interest of Downing Street and the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”, with gongs riding on it, had been a disaster. On that day therefore a series of announcements were made, each directed at a different sector of the UK’s educational establishment. I have dug the pages out of the web archive (NB archive pages are SLOW to load) for reference, so that we have here the general one with the links. The links on that page still work and take you the original, unsullied, archived material. (Note that these pages all take 20-30 seconds to load from the web archive, so be patient and wait. Think of your first experience of the World Wide Web. They will come up).

There’s plenty of evidence of panic:

1) Following the disastrous launch, the site is now described as a “prelaunch testing version”. How they must have struggled with such a formula.

2) The Independent Colleges page is actually headed “Independent Schools”. The pages were not even proof read.

3) The Boarding Schools page declares an intention to have “details of the age range, gender mix and general course offerings of schools”. But as we can see (video here) , they never succeeded.

4) There are rash and foolish promises such as “Our longer term priorities will be the development of the on-line counselling functions, the enhancements of the on-line applications facility and the possible integration of telephone call centre technology into the site.” Oh dear.

5) They invent recent history on all the pages. “After a rigorous selection procedure, the British Council entered into a contractual partnership with a consortium led by Hotcourses to develop the Education UK web site and associated databases. The other consortium members are UCAS, CSU and Yahoo!”. Actually they contracted a £100 company Education Websites Ltd, and tried to bury the evidence a few years later. UCAS and CSU were specifically excluded from the contract, and there was no contractual relationship with Yahoo of any kind. There was no need to lie to everybody, so let’s put it down to panic.

6) The “rigorous selection procedure” meant negotiating a contract which paid a percentage of the profits to the British Council. Rigour? Please.

7) On the FE page they say “Over the course of the next few weeks we will be continuing to work on the search functions for EL providers and Schools”. Actually they had just abandoned their previously chosen search functions and were starting again. And we can see today (video here) that they hadn’t a clue what they were doing.

8) On the HE page it notes that the HE data is taken from UCAS and CSU and so “should be correct”. Indeed, it should have been. It was. The problem for the last 8 years has been that the British Council didn’t have a mechanism to search through that data properly (see our videos on Loughborough and Glasgow Caledonian).

It was a terrible mess. They have had 8 years to sort out that mess, and they have not done so. It’s still a terrible mess, and the British Council’s pretence that the Education UK site has been instrumental in international student recruitment and has “achieved its goals” is patent hogwash. Like the organisation behind it, the Education UK website has simply got in everybody’s way.

I'm prepared to admit that I may have produced too much knocking copy, by highlighting course records on quality sites which could not be found or are somehow scrambled on Education UK. So, in the interests of balance, let me put that right. Here below is a small selection of courses that will not be found on the professional sites, and which are uniquely found on Education UK. There are many more of course. Some, like the "Pagan Sex" course identified earlier are Postgraduate, which I think is understandable, and some undergraduate. In all cases Education UK is anxious to get the visitor off the HE search and into English language courses or, as we would say, out of the frying pan and into the fire.

 

Presumably it is not just Loughborough and Glasgow Caledonian universities who have twigged the extent of the Education UK failure at the level of Higher Education, or Dollar Academy the hopeless service offered to the Boarding School sector (which the British Council now has the neck to charge £1950.00 as a registration fee) or the EFL sector - bear in mind that the results of ANY search on Education UK are headed by an exhortation to search for English language courses - or Summer schools etc.
Education UK, that priority service arising from the “Prime Minister’s Initiative” (aka PMI), represents failure on a grand scale. Expensive failure too. Not only because the schools, the colleges and the universities have, for the past 8 years, been asked to shell out large sums to the already heavily floated and bloated British Council, but also expensive because it doesn’t do the job.

The British Council claims that the Education UK websites attract over 1 million visitors a month. You have only to look at the sites to see that they could not possibly attract that sort of number. It is rather that the British Council’s state-endowed network and the rest of the Establishment has been persuaded, by the British Council and the pomp and majesty of the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”, to direct visitors to this woefully inadequate resource. Even if we make the generous but clearly fallacious assumption that by a twist of fate half the visitors to this site find what they are looking for, and that the other half waste only 5 minutes each before they realise that they have hit Duff City and go elsewhere, that still means 2.5 million minutes monthly wasted on the site. 2.5 million minutes per month wasted over a year amounts to 57 years. Over the life of the site that would be between 400 and 500 years.

And they can’t say they weren’t warned. On October 11th, 2002 I wrote this in a letter to Rod Pryde, Assistant Director-General of the British Council:

“The Education UK web site today is manifestly doing more harm than good to international students, British education, and the British Council. Every time you ask a student to use it you are in effect encouraging a British Council bypass, and risking a Britain bypass. British institutions are being encouraged by the Council to pay to be linked or profiled or whatever on that site, and they do it because of such credibility as the Council still enjoys. But it’s a poor investment from all points of view - a sort of virtual clip-joint masquerading as public service.”

And of course it’s the same today. 500 years later. It is because British Council personnel have been spending their time dreaming up “innovative, inspirational” superlatives to describe themselves, and nobody in the organisation has spent even a few minutes making an intelligent appraisal of the rubbish they peddle. Just think what they could have saved. And think too how much better both students and educational establishments would have been served for these last eight years if only the Prime Minister had really used his initiative rather than gifting yet another monopoly to this deeply incompetent organisation.

There is more than one reason for this video. Firstly, it demonstrates that the example we made with Loughborough University is easily replicated with another UK university (and we could continue in that vein ad nauseam). Secondly, we have deliberately targeted a university whose Vice-Chancellor and Principal is a British Council Trustee.

1. The Higher Education Service we describe here for Glasgow Caledonian (and as we did a couple of days ago for Loughborough) is rather obviously substandard. But it is a great deal better than the service provided for, for example, the English language course providers or British boarding schools.
2. This embarrassingly poor quality service has been what the British Council has offered the world at large on behalf of British education for almost eight years. Far from giving the UK competitive advantage during that time, the Education UK service of the British Council has been a dead weight on international student recruitment.
3. During those eight years, many British Council staff have been awarded gongs by HM The Queen for their involvement in the “Prime Minister’s Initiative”, and have retired summa cum laude on comfortable state pensions. But what they did for Britain, for international student recruitment and British educational institutions, would be a joke if it were not so damaging.
4. British Universities and Colleges and Schools, not to mention the ever-raided British taxpayers, have handed over millions to this organisation, which has taken the money and provided a nil or just shoddy service in return. Quite apart from the £200 million taxpayer subvention, the tax breaks and the unfunded pensions of which the organisation is a beneficiary, universities each pay the British Council up to £20,000, plus £800 or so per country for local intelligence, per year, before they can even have a stand at an exhibition (which then has to be paid for again). The Education UK website meanwhile is little more than a virtual clipjoint.

The British Council counts on the Establishment to back them through thick and thin, and to licence them to leverage their state-funded buildings, resources and privileges to provide unfair competition with genuine enterprise and expertise, at home and abroad. Almost any company could have done a better job of using the Internet for international marketing and student recruitment than the British Council has done with Education UK. But the government uses state funds to enhance the organisation’s privilege, to shore up its propaganda machine, and to deny opportunity. That’s eight years wasted so far.

I can’t expect all the readers of this blog to know its background, so here’s a quick recap.

1. In addition to numerous benefits and privileges, closed contracts and state pension arrangements, the British Council gets a daily (i.e. 365) subvention from the taxpayer which is a substantial multiple of my annual turnover. That means competition from them with me, or with any other genuine enterprise (whether at home or abroad), can never be fair.

2. So I shouldn’t have gone into competition with them? It was of course the British Council who chose to marshal its state-endowed advantages and use them to go into direct competition with me. In 2001 my enterprise was already 13 years old, and the company's position as market leader was established.

3. In that year the British Council had a cooperative agreement (1998-2003) with my company. This included a contractual obligation to support our publications with their “best endeavours”. At this time we were meeting the full cost, and risk, of supplying the British Council with printed guides and CDs (we supplied altogether about 1 million products worldwide), and our offline database was installed on all British Council computers worldwide.

4. Over and above the points in (1), but in order further to ensure that the playing field would now be tilted at a sharper angle in their favour, the British Council

• signed a competing contract in which it had a financial interest 
• obtained my signature on a waiver without revealing this key fact
• appointed the same managers, with whom I was obliged to liaise for the purposes of our cooperative agreement, to oversee the development of a direct competitor to our product
• seriously misrepresented their own contractual arrangements to the public in general, and specifically and deliberately to my client base in particular. Well OK, they lied.

5. When it was clear (in 2004) that I would not shut up (and had written to Charles Clarke, at that time Secretary of State for Education), the British Council (actually the Director-General David Green) unilaterally and secretly instigated an “investigation” which involved internal contact with only the managers referred to in (4) above. It then used this non-investigation as a basis for rejecting any further enquiry by any person, with the formula that there was “no basis for (my) claims”.

6. In 2005 when I made a related FoI enquiry to the British Council concerning whether there had been any variations or amendments to the British Council’s 2001 contract with (£100 company) Education Websites Ltd, I was told there were none. In fact the contract had been switched to Sheffield Data Services Ltd (which strikes me as a pretty significant amendment, and at the very least a reason for not saying no variation or amendment). In March 2005 Education Websites Ltd swapped names with a new company called Remone Ltd and an application was made to Companies House to have Remone Ltd (i.e. the original British Council contractor from 2001) struck from the record. Now why would they do that?

7. Because what took place in 2004 was a deliberate stitchup and in no sense an investigation, my quest for truth and justice has necessarily continued. Truth and justice remain concepts which the British Council struggles with, however, and in a later blog we shall look at why, and what needs to be done about it.

The demand for videos with school presentations looks very strong, and I am quite happy to have a site that focuses on UK schools, boarding and language schools, at UK school videos. But I'm already involved with videos outside the UK, such as the French and Italian ones on this blog, so I've put up a "sister" site called International school videos, which you can see here. Instead of searching by UK region, you choose a country (yes, I know, it needs more countries...). When the site went up I was contacted almost immediately by a school in Malta who wanted their video included, and I hope to have that in place very soon.

You can see where our principal site visitors are from at any one time by clicking here. Just wait for the three maps to load.
 

I’m guessing, but I think that is one reason why videos of schools are popular. Delving into somebody’s web site can be difficult in another language (when did you last look for something on a Chinese site? or even a German one?) but seeing pupils/students in a school, their staff and their buildings in action, even if you don’t understand everything they say, can create a strong impression.

And if the thesis is correct, and there are people who want to make video a part of their review process, it is not efficient for them to search through non-standardised and usually monoglot school sites to see if there’s a video there. That is the thinking behind our new site UK school videos. If the viewer is interested by the video, there is a simple link to the client web site, so the site is in effect a video portal for boarding schools and language schools.

It’s still very early days but we have excellent results from Yahoo and Google, and some of the videos on the site have already been watched there several hundred times. So far approximately 10% of views result in clicks through to the school site.

For the second time this year I have had the pleasure of reading a book written by someone I count as a friend. Knowing the author of a book, particularly when the book is very personal, adds an extra dimension because you can seek and find the person you know in the telling, and enjoy finding your perceptions nuanced and enriched. Nic Ridley’s book “Godfrey’s Ghost – from father to son” is a great deal more, however, than a book to be read by his friends. At one level it is a book for a single reader, his son Christopher. At another it is a book for us all. At one level it is a biography of man who made his career as a playwright and actor, but who also fought in two world wars and who saw both triumph and disaster, personally and financially. At another it is an exploration of the father-son relationship, as well as a relentless self-examination, and even a philosophical odyssey.

Nic Ridley’s father was Arnold Ridley, celebrated as a young man as author of “The Ghost Train”, and in his old age and in the 25 years since his death as Private Godfrey in the hugely successful series “Dad’s Army”. For his son Christopher, Nic wants to separate the man from the actor, and more specifically from the benign, acquiescent, bumbling, geriatric part of Godfrey, which to this day he can see on his television screen almost any week of the year. In telling his father’s story, and in his quest for the true depiction of his character, Nic also turns the microscope quite ruthlessly on himself, not sparing the anger, the selfishness, or the harshness, while not obscuring his tenderness, his deep sense of loyalty towards, and love of, his family, which are also woven into his quest. This book is a fascinating construct, an engrossing story, a moving and intimate examination of family, and will be an enduring record of a man who treated “those two impostors just the same”. And it is quite beautifully written. In this respect, as in so many others, the author is his father’s son.

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I hope Nic won’t mind if I mention here my own father. After he died in 1985, I found a handwritten poem in his desk which I add below because it touches on a part of the relationship between fathers and sons.

At Louth

Visiting here by chance
It comes back to me that forty years ago
We came here, my father and I.
He told me much as we looked
At the spire and the altar
But I was listening to other voices.
We enjoyed our day but, driving back
Over the wolds in that evening of late March,
He must have felt a little sad
The sadness of all fathers,
And I a little impatient,
The impatience of all sons
To be back at their own affairs.
Now, if I could meet him on these steps,
With his smile of greeting,
I could understand so easily what he was getting at
And, two old men,
We should go into the church together.