APPENDIX 7
Memorandum from the British Council
THE BRITISH COUNCIL IN TURKEY
INTRODUCTION
1. Background
The British Council has operated without interruption
in Turkey since its establishment in 1940. A Cultural Convention
signed in 1952 recognises the Council's role as the principal
agency for bilateral cultural relations, and is still in force.
Since 1978 the Council has operated as the Cultural section of
the British Embassy. This formal status facilitates our relations
with governmental institutions without imposing restrictions on
our activities. We enjoy excellent relations at all levels of
Turkish society. The government gives strong encouragement to
European cultural institutions, which are seen as an important
underpinning to Turkey's European aspirations.
2. Regional network
The Council currently has centres in Ankara,
Istanbul and Izmir. In all three locations we offer well-resourced
libraries and information services, advice on educational opportunities
in Britain and access to British examinations, and programmes
of support to English teachers. Ankara is important as the seat
of government and the location of a number of Turkey's most important
public and private universities. Most of the work we are undertaking
to support Turkey's accession to the European Union is managed
from this centre. In Istanbul we moved to a new, high-quality
building in 2000 which has enabled us to considerably expand our
successful English teaching operation—so far our only such
operation in Turkey. We now enrol approximately 1,000 students
each term. In Izmir our operation was expanded in 2000 from a
modest centre providing support to English language teachers into
one which offers a full range of services, albeit on a smaller
scale than Ankara or Istanbul. Demand, particularly for our library
and related services, has been extremely strong and our priority
for expansion in the medium term is to relocate to premises which
will enable us to meet this demand satisfactorily and at the same
time to establish a teaching centre.
3. Resources
Turkey is one of the Council's highest priority
countries. The grant in aid budget for 2002-03 is £2,360,000.
We also receive further funding of £185,000 for education
promotion work (Turkey is one of the priority markets under the
Prime Minister's initiative to attract more overseas students
to Britain). In addition to this, we generate about £1,230,000
of income locally, principally from the teaching centre in Istanbul
and from fees charged for British examinations. All sources of
local income have been sharply reduced since the sudden and severe
devaluation of the Turkish lira in February 2001. Demand for a
number of our services-Examinations, English language courses
in Britain, library membership, etc., has been much lower than
forecast as it has been affected by the economic downturn, although
there are now indications of recovery. The present economic climate
has also made it much more difficult to attract local sponsorship
for our activities, particularly commercial sponsorship for our
work in the Arts.
There are currently 83 members of British Council
staff in Turkey, including five UK-appointed managerial staff
and 20 teachers and teacher trainers. The directorate is led by
Ray Thomas, who is also Cultural Counsellor of the British Embassy
in Ankara.
4. Extending Impact in the Future
Turkey has a population conservatively estimated
to be 67 million, and a land area about three and a half times
bigger than the United Kingdom. There are ten urban centres with
populations of more than a million people. It also has the youngest
age profile of any European country, with 65 per cent of the population
aged 30 or less, and the highest rate of population increase.
The Council, with three centres, all located in the western half
of the country, therefore faces a considerable challenge in achieving
a substantial impact from its relatively limited resources.
Our strategy to meet this challenge is threefold.
Firstly, we intend over the coming five years to extend our geographical
coverage by opening new centres. Apart from the upgrading and
expansion in Izmir mentioned above, we plan to establish new centres
on the Asian side of Istanbul (our current building is on the
European side) and in Adana in the south-east. These centres will
be built around English teaching operations in order to reduce
their cost to the grant in aid. Secondly, we will continue our
current policy of ensuring that our activities are extended as
far as possible beyond the three cities in which we have a physical
presence, particularly by maintaining and developing partnerships
with local authorities, chambers of commerce, universities and
schools. (For example, our work in promoting British English language
examinations relies on a network of provincial centres run by
teachers with our support). Thirdly, and most importantly, we
will continue to exploit new technology, especially the Internet,
to provide information and services to people throughout the country.
5. Exploiting New Technology
There is no doubt that new communications technologies
offer enormous potential to the Council to reach substantially
greater numbers of people in Turkey than would be possible through
face-to-face contact. The rate of increase in the use of the internet
in Turkey is among the highest in the world. When the Council
conducted a survey in 1999 to determine how young people in Turkey
obtained information about Britain, only 4 per cent cited the
internet as their principal source. In 2001, that percentage had
increased to 54 per cent. For this reason we invest substantial
resources in the maintenance and development of our website http://www.britishcouncil.org.tr/index.htm
, not only as an information tool, but also as a way of engaging
with people who might never be able to visit our centres. We are
now, for example, delivering teacher training courses over the
internet, and offering the facility to borrow books and other
materials from our libraries by e-mail. In the last two months
alone, the number of visits to our site each month has doubled,
from 700,000 to 1,400,000.
6. Principal Activities and Programmes
Our overall aim is to win recognition for the
UK's values, ideas and achievements, and nurture lasting, mutually
beneficial relationships between Turkey and the UK. To achieve
this we have identified six key "strategic themes" around
which all of our work is organised. These are:
(a) Supporting Turkey's accession to the European
Union
Turkey's acceptance as a candidate country for
EU membership at the Helsinki summit in 1999 has provided an enormous
impetus for change in the country, and offers us the opportunity
to secure the UK's reputation as the preferred partner, and source
of expertise, in the transformation of Turkish society that will
be needed.
— We work closely with the British
Embassy in Ankara to implement projects in human rights, governance
and democratic reform funded by the FCO's Human Rights Projects
Fund and Global Conflict Prevention Fund and aimed at assisting
Turkey to meet the Copenhagen criteria for accession to the EU.
Activities over the last three years have included projects in
judicial and penal reform, women's and children's rights, and
prison reform.
— Every two years we organise the Antalya
Conference, a high level forum for discussion and debate on issues
facing Britain and Turkey in the European context. The first two
conferences, in 1998 and 2000, were jointly chaired by Sir Malcolm
Rifkind and Erdal Inonu, former Foreign Minister of Turkey, and
attracted senior politicians, academics, journalists and business
people from Britain, Turkey, and a number of other European countries.
The next event is now being planned for October 2002. The Council
also organises regular lectures and discussion groups in Turkey
on key Accession-related themes.
— Turkey will very soon qualify to
take part in the European programmes (SOCRATES, LEONARDO, YOUTH,
etc) established to promote greater mobility within the EU for
young people, students, teachers, academics and researchers. We
aim to build a sound platform for the UK and Turkey to benefit
from these programmes by developing strong bilateral links. For
example, we have recently undertaken a project to train the leaders
of Youth organisations in Turkey to develop projects for European
funding, and have begun working with the Turkish Higher Education
Council to provide assistance in the establishment of their national
agency for the European programmes.
(b) Promoting British Education
Turkey is a priority market under the Prime
Minister's Initiative to attract more overseas students to Britain,
and the Council plays a key role in promoting the UK education
and training sector in Turkey. Although Turkey has 77 public and
private higher education institutions with a total student population
of 1.6 million, this is far short of what is needed to meet the
demand and only 300,000 of the 1.5 million who apply each year
gain access to any form of post-secondary education. Although
only a small percentage of these have the financial resources
to study overseas, this still represents a substantial market
for Britain. There are about 3,000 Turkish students at British
Universities at present, the numbers holding steady despite a
very substantial fall in the Turkish government's overseas scholarship
programme. At the further education level, numbers are growing
by 12-15 per cent a year-mostly those attending short English
language courses.
— Our three centres all offer comprehensive
information and one-to-one advice to prospective students, while
those unable to visit can access a wealth of information through
our website.
— We organise an annual British Education
Fair in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, bringing University representatives
to Turkey to recruit students. Over 12,000 visitors attended these
events in November 2001.
— We provide a full placement service
for students wishing to attend a recognised English language school
in Britain, and also encourage and support a network of reputable
private agents offering a similar service.
— There is a growing demand for British
examinations, which are seen to represent internationally recognised
standards of achievement. We work particularly closely with UCLES
(University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate) on the
promotion of a range of English language exams, and in particular
in making these available in cities outside Ankara, Istanbul and
Izmir. The IELTS (International English language testing service)
examination is accepted by a number of Universities in Turkey
as exempting students from the preparatory year of undergraduate
degree courses. Over 7,000 British exams were administered by
us in 2001.
— In January 2002, we organised a visit
to Britain by the President of the Turkish Higher Education Council
to initiate partnerships between British and Turkish Universities
in the development of joint distance-taught programmes at both
the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
(c) Supporting the teaching and learning of
English.
The demand for English is growing strongly in
Turkey, largely at the expense of other European languages such
as French and German. English is not only seen as essential to
the prospect of education or employment abroad but also as increasingly
necessary in obtaining a good job in Turkey—limited employment
opportunities mean that those with a high standard of English
have a strong competitive edge.
— We have expanded our teaching centre
in Istanbul, and hope to open further centres there and in other
cities in the next 2-4 years. Our aim is not to generate a high
volume of students for its own sake but to set the highest possible
standards in order to provide a model of excellence in teaching
and learning in a distinctively British environment.
— We provide extensive support to English
teachers throughout Turkey in both the public and private sectors
through programmes of teacher training and materials development,
both face-to-face and through the web.
— Our libraries, although they also
support other objectives, are primarily resources for both teachers
and learners of English, and offer a comprehensive range of print
and non-print materials.
— Anadolu University, Turkey's only
distance learning institution, has embarked on a programme to
train 50,000 English teachers over the next ten years to meet
the growing demand within the school system. The Council is working
on a number of initiatives to support this programme, including
the development of jointly validated qualifications with Universities
in Britain.
(d) Projecting British Creativity, Scientific
Innovation, and Cultural Diversity
The "Through Other Eyes" survey of
overseas perceptions of Britain carried out by the Council in
1999 revealed that while young people in Turkey had a generally
positive opinion of Britain, there was insufficient awareness
and understanding of British creativity and innovation in science,
technology and the arts, and of the multicultural nature of modern
British society. Our work in these fields is now explicitly directed
towards altering perceptions, particularly of young people, and
raising awareness of contemporary British society. In the Arts
field, although we continue to support a limited number of major
cultural festivals, the emphasis is mainly on innovative events
which appeal to new audiences and convey the liveliness and diversity
of Britain today, particularly in fields such as film, music and
dance but also in areas such as design and computer technology.
Recent events have included a "virtual" exhibition of
works created on, and for, the internet, and a national computer
gaming tournament designed not only to attract the interest and
participation of a young audience but to make them aware that
the software technology involved originates in Britain.
As well as these activities, the Council supports
academic exchanges and joint scientific research projects between
Universities in Britain and Turkey in fields as diverse as wetlands
ecology and earthquake resistant buildings
(e) Building Networks
We believe that we can increase substantially
the impact of our work in Turkey by ensuring that we maintain
long term relationships, especially with those who have undertaken
extended periods of study in Britain and are prepared to work
with us in developing closer relations between Britain and Turkey
in the future. The Council manages the Chevening scholarship programme
in Turkey on behalf of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and
works closely with the Embassy to ensure that contacts with returned
scholars are maintained and developed. There are now over 1,200
ex-Chevening scholars in Turkey, many occupying positions of increasing
influence. We devote considerable attention to sustaining relations
with them, notably by supporting the national British alumni association,
the Turco-British Fellowship Club.
In December 2001, the Council organised in Turkey
a major workshop attended by Council staff and British university
alumni from 28 countries to share experience and develop more
effective ways of building long-term relationships with alumni
in the future.
(f) "Connecting Futures"
Connecting Futures is a new initiative which
aims to build deeper mutual understanding and respect between
people from different cultural backgrounds, and in particular
to develop opportunities for dialogue and for genuinely co-operative
projects between young people. It will focus initially, but not
exclusively, on countries with significant Muslim populations,
in recognition of current political concerns. Turkey is one of
the countries which will be involved in the initiative.
Details of the initiative as it will be implemented
in Turkey are not yet finalised, but the programme will certainly
focus on increasing contacts and exchanges between young people
in Britain and Turkey, both face-to-face and virtually. It is
also likely to involve increased exchanges between teachers, building
on the huge demand that exists for the training of English teachers
in Turkey. Turkey's position as a secular republic in which the
overwhelming majority of the population is Muslim also means that
it can make a unique contribution to such an initiative.
The British Council
January 2002
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