British Council

File:British Council logo.jpg

Logo of the British Council

British Council building in London

British Council, Hong Kong

The British Council is one of the United Kingdom's cultural relations organisations and which specialises in educational opportunities. It is a non-departmental public body and is registered as a charity in England. Founded in 1934, one of its patrons is Queen Elizabeth II and its Chair is Lord Kinnock, the former leader of the UK Labour Party. Its 'sponsoring department' is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, although it has day-to-day operational independence. Martin Davidson is its Chief Executive, appointed in April 2007.

Overview

The British Council exists "to build mutually beneficial cultural and educational relationships between the United Kingdom and other countries, and increase appreciation of the United Kingdom’s creative ideas and achievements." Its overseas network extends to 110 countries and territories. It has UK branch offices in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff and a headquarters in Spring Gardens, off Whitehall in central London.

Initatives

While supporting curriculum development with teaching materials the British Council is also strengthening perceptions of the UK by introducing millions of people to British ideas. There are 70 British Council Teaching Centres in 53 countries. It taught 1,189,000 class hours to 300,000 learners in 2006/07.

In examination centres around the world, the British Council administers 1.5 million UK examinations to over one million candidates each year- and this is set to grow. The British Council is making it easier to register and pay for these examinations online. The British Council is also working with the UK's award bodies to extend the range of professional qualifications available overseas to establish the UK as the international benchmark in areas such as accounting.

In schools around the UK, the British Council is working with the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and the devolved administrations to help three million children gain an International School Award, which increases their understanding and appreciation of other cultures. There are now 2700 UK schools working towards an award. In the Middle East the British Council has launched a major school links programme to bring together children in the UK and the region to breakdown negative perceptions and foster inter-cultural dialogue. 153 schools in the region are involved in 53 collaborative projects.

On playing fields in 40 countries young people have learned new leadership and teambuilding skills by being involved in Dreams+Teams sports festivals. 5500 young leaders have been trained and 280,000 people have been reached in their schools and communities through programme activities. The British Council is expanding the programme to help more young people prepare for global citizenship.

English for peace is an important and growing element of British Council English language work in Africa. It works with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence to improve the English language skills of military personnel assigned to international peacekeeping duties through the Peacekeeping English Project (PEP). PEP is helping prepare approximately 50,000 military and police service personnel in 28 countries worldwide for peacekeeping mission duties.

In many countries, including the UK, the British Council runs cafés scientifiques, informal events to engage people with creative ideas about science. They take place in cafes, bars and bookshops and begin with a short talk from a UK scientist or science writer. Events so far have brought together audiences from as far away as India and Malaysia to discuss the social and ethical aspects of issues from Darwin to DNA, from global warming to artificial intelligence.

ZeroCarbonCity is the British Council’s global campaign to raise awareness about climate change and the energy challenges facing the world’s cities. It chose climate change as the major theme for its science work to underline the leadership being shown by the UK in tackling this major issue, the Prime Minister’s commitment to use the G8 and EU presidencies to renew efforts to confront the global challenges. The programme included a touring exhibition, an online global debate and series of seminars and conferences. 62 countries have participated in ZeroCarbon City and 2.5 million people have been reached directly by the campaign.

The British Council-supported production of Love’s Labours Lost in 2005 was the first performance of a Shakespeare play in Afghanistan in over 17 years. The play was performed in the Afghan language of Dari and the capacity audience responded enthusiastically to the eternal and universal themes of Shakespeare’s play and to the local references and music.

The British Council has pioneered work on promoting the UK experience with the creative industries abroad, including running a series of awards for young creative entrepreneurs worldwide such as the International Young Publisher of the Year and International Young Music Entrepreneur of the Year awards.

Making a world of difference

Criticism

In March 2007 the British Council announced its 'intention to increase its investment in the Middle East, North Africa and Central and Southern Asia'. This will largely be funded by cuts in other services, libraries and office closures across Europe. In June 2007 MPs were told of further closures in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (where there had been a British Council Library since 1946). The British Council library in Athens is also to close.

British Council libraries and offices have also been closed in a number of other countries judged by The British Council to be of little strategic or commercial importance to the Council as it refocused its activities on China and The Gulf where it can get a 'bigger bang for the buck'. Council offices were closed in Lesotho, Swaziland, Ecuador and provincial Länder in Germany in 2000–2001 — as well as Belarus — prompting Parliamentary criticism. Subsequent promises by British Council Chair Kinnock to a conference in Edinburgh that the Belarus closure would hopefully prove to be just a "temporary" withdrawal proved illusory. The British Council office in Peru also closed in September 2006 as part of a rethink of its strategy in Latin America .

Following the closure of the British Council Library in Athens and the transfer of 8,000 books — 'the entire literary heritage of The British Council in Greece' — to the English department of Athens University, the novelist Fay Weldon, who had been a vociferous supporter of the earlier campaign to prevent the closure of the British Council's libraries, complained to The Observer that British Council abandonment of Europe in favour of a huge increase in funding for activities in the Middle East and Muslim world would hit women fiction writers especially hard because they will not be read in those closed patriarchal societies with tiny educated élites. 'I hope the Islamic world is grateful,' Weldon told The Observer, but 'I doubt that it will be.' Continuing her attack on British Council decision making she added: 'What do they hope to do? Win hearts and minds by sending in rappers to Saudi Arabia and the Middle East? We're trying to impose our culture and values on the culture of countries that don't share them, in the extraordinary conviction that we are right. All of this feels like somebody's bright idea that has not been properly thought out. The British Council should examine its own motives, attitudes and indeed cultural imperialism, because what they are doing is totally short-sighted.' The same article also quoted Charles Arnold-Baker, author of The Companion to British History as saying of the British Council's shift in priorities: 'This whole policy is misconstrued from top to bottom. We are going somewhere where we can't succeed and neglecting our friends in Europe who wish us well. The only people who are going to read our books in Beirut or Baghdad are converts already .

The article also points out that the Institut Francais and Goethe-Institut, unlike British Council, are both expanding and replenishing libraries Europe-wide . France opened its new library in Tel Aviv in 2007 — just a few months after British Council closed there and shut down the British Council library in West Jerusalem . In Gaza, the Institut Francais supports the Gaza municipal library in partnership with the local authority and a municipal twinning link between Gaza City and a French port Dunkerque .

[1] Far from quitting, British Council is bridging gaps, letter to The Observer, 12 August 2007

While Members of Parliament and others have criticised the lack of strong parliamentary accountability for the British Council, the organisation does have close lobbying links to individual parliamentarians. These included the Conservative Party Shadow Culture spokesman Jeremy Hunt MP whose Hotcourses company has close links to The British Council through Sheffield Data Services .

Formally it is to its sponsoring department, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, that the UK Parliamentary Table Office refers any parliamentary questions about British Council .

Of its total income of £551m in 2006/07, the British Council received £195m of grants from the British government. The rest was earned through charging for teaching English to individuals and organisations, examinations and commercial consultancy — often acting as a managing agent for UK Government departments which it lobbies assiduously for business. Its main 'areas of activity', at least as reflected by its website, are 'Learning/Teaching, the Arts, Science and Society'. In recent years it has experienced difficulties operating in Russia, contributing itself to the sometimes tense UK-Russia relationship. It operates under a 1994 "cultural agreement", but has been under pressure from the Russian authorities for some years to establish a new Cultural Centres Agreement (CCA) which would formalise the British Council's status in Russia. The British Council is now registered for tax in Russia and following threats of court action, BC now pays tax on its "fee-earning work". Incidentally, the head of the British Council office in St. Petersburg is Stephen Kinnock.

The British Council in China operates in rather murky waters. It employs non-Chinese English language examiners on contracts that do not appear to be enforceable under either Chinese or British law. Complaints about these contracts have not been addressed and attempts to engage in dialogue with senior managers in China and in the UK have repeatedly been ignored. The effectiveness of British Council efforts to promote higher education in China have also recently been examined in England by The House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Skills in a report issued on 5 August 2007 . It expressed concern that in terms of joint educational programmes involving Chinese universities, UK lagged behind Australia, USA, Hong Kong China, Canada and France. In its evidence to this committee, The British Council had argued that "UK degrees are highly valued by international students for their global recognition. International students adopt an essentially utilitarian view of higher education which is likely to increasingly involve consideration of value for money, including opting for programmes at least partly delivered offshore". As their preferred marketing 'model', The British Council gave the example of India where their UK India Education and Research Initiative is being 'championed' by British multinational oil companies such as BP and Shell, the pharmaceutical giant GSK and arms company BAe Systems which is under investigation by the US Justice Department for its commercial ethics.

Criticism of British Council marketing efforts have also come from Scotland where The Sunday Herald obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act showing that British Council's Marketing Co-ordinator in the USA had been referring to The University of Stirling as 'The University of Sterling' (sic) and also documenting 'tensions' between Scottish Executive civil servants and British Council in India and China over overseas promotion of universities in Scotland where education is a devolved responsibility. The Sunday Herald reported that these turf wars were undermining the Scottish Executive's key Fresh Talent policy .

After 1998 education and culture in Scotland were devolved to the Scottish Parliament. Charities registered in England (like British Council) which now wish to operate in Scotland are required to register as cross-border charities in Scotland from February 2007.

Founded in 1934 as the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries, the British Council was inspired by Sir Reginald (Rex) Leeper's recognition of the importance of "cultural propaganda" in promoting British interests.

It is also featured in one of the scenes in Graham Greene's The Third Man — the Wildfred Hyde-White character (Crabbin) in the film of that novel, worked for The British Council. In 1946, the writer George Orwell advised serious authors not to work for it as a day-job arguing that "the effort [of writing] is too much to make if one has already squandered one's energies on semi-creative work such as teaching, broadcasting or composing propaganda for bodies such as the British Council" (from 'Horizon Questionnaire: The Cost of Letters', in Horizon, 1946). In her autobiography, Dame Stella Rimington, the first woman head of MI5, mentions working for British Council in India prior to joining the British Intelligence Services. British Council employees also seem to feature regularly in the special section of the UK Honours List reserved for those attached to overseas diplomatic postings despite the ambiguous status of the organisation and confusion over whether they are entitled to normal diplomatic immunities in countries such as Russia. The Russian Government has also challenged their claim to be exempt from paying local taxation on their commercial language teaching courses and over The British Council's support for Russian NGOs that are perceived as political. The British Council has been refered to (and its man on-station, Goole) - frequently in a humorous way by Lawrence Durrell in his collection of anecdotes about a diplomat's life on foreign postings for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office - Antrobus Complete.

Chairs

Chairs of the British Council have been:

• 1934 – 1937 Lord Tyrrell
• 1937 – 1941 Lord Lloyd
• 1941 – 1945 Sir Malcolm Robertson
• 1946 – 1955 Sir Ronald Adam
• 1955 – 1959 Sir David Kelly
• 1959 – 1967 Lord Bridges
• 1968 – 1971 Lord Fulton
• 1971 – 1972 Sir Leslie Rowan
• 1972 – 1976 Lord Ballantrae
• 1977 – 1984 Sir Charles Troughton
• 1985 – 1992 Sir David Orr
• 1992 – 1998 Sir Martin Jacomb
• 1998 – 2004 Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
• 2004 – present Lord Kinnock

Recognition

In 2005, along with the Alliance française, the Società Dante Alighieri, the Goethe-Institut, the Instituto Cervantes and the Instituto Camões, the British Council shared in the Prince of Asturias Award for the outstanding achievements of Western Europe's national cultural agencies in communications and the humanities. At the time of this joint award the full extent of The British Council's closure policies in Europe was not yet public knowledge.

See also

Other organisations: Alliance française Dante Alighieri Society Estonian Institute Goethe-Institut Instituto Cervantes Instituto Camões Confucius Institute Stowarzyszenie "Wspólnota Polska"

Related topics Café Scientifique Eunic Festival of Muslim Cultures Quango

External links

• British Council official website