Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MR DAVID
GREEN, DR
NEIL KEMP
AND MR
NICK BUTLER
7 JUNE 2004
Q60 Chairman: But we have about 40 higher
education institutions in London. That is the truth of it.
Mr Kemp: Of course.
Mr Green: That would be a very
interesting bit of research to do.
Helen Jones: The reason I ask that is
something that I have come across, not in my own home town but
in one nearby, where you have to explain to people that the people
wearing designer trainers and track suits are not wealthy asylum
seekers living off the fat of the land but students at the local
college. I am just wondering how much those sorts of perceptions
influence the quality of the students' experience outside the
main university areas. It might be worth looking at.
Q61 Chairman: Why do people want to go
to Australia? Is it because of the sunshine? You talked about
blue skies. Is it the blue skies? They have not got one really
high rated university in the top 50 globally, have they? They
are not at the top end of the market, are they?
Mr Green: Certainly in terms of
the marketing it is the climate, it is the lifestyle, it is the
access to sporting facilities, all of those things. That is what
they use in order to attract students and they do it very successfully.
Q62 Chairman: Students go to Australia
for the sunshine, the barbecues and the lifestyle, not for the
quality of the education?
Mr Green: Clearly they market
the education and the educational experience, but they have the
added advantages that their climate brings that, sadly, we do
not have in the UK.
Q63 Chairman: On a point that Neil Kemp
raised just now in terms of commissioning particular research,
I do not know if you have ever looked at this Committee's work
on retention because, as you were answering us, it sounded very
familiar and I know Helen Jones will remember this inquiry into
retention. We found that for UK students the secret is making
sure that the student who is retained is the one that is on the
course that they wanted to be on, and that they are given very
good care in that first year, which is the year where people are
most likely to drop out. They are on the right course in the right
place and the pastoral care is good. That came out very clearly
rather than student debt or almost anything else.
Mr Green: Can I invite Neil to
comment on the Colin Gilligan report because there were some issues
that he raised which were then taken up by institutions.
Mr Kemp: There was a whole range
of them. Efficiency and effectiveness of the student support systems
were questioned. The care from day one—have we got it right
in the way we respond to students initially? What he found was
that students would apply and they would not hear anything for
two or three months, by which time they had applied to Australia
and got a reply within two or three days and an offer within a
week and they were gone. The idea was to sharpen up the act in
terms of how we responded in this global market in which an individual
student could be spending anything from £15,000 to £50,000.
We had to respond accordingly and treat those individuals in that
same way. That has resulted in institutions putting in place stronger
support systems, particularly in the international office. International
office staff get to know their students on a personal level, because
often they have met them when they recruited them at an education
fair. They come back and they develop that personal relationship.
We did learn a bit from the Australians on that. They did get
that right, that level of personal care. They are still able to
market on quality as well, in response to your comments earlier.
Q64 Chairman: I was teasing you.
Mr Kemp: I think Melbourne and
Sydney might have a view on that.
Q65 Valerie Davey: Neil, you mentioned
what Nottingham is doing in using finance and aiming it at students
who perhaps could not afford it. Should the British Council not
have done more in this report to identify where education would
be extremely valuable within the world and said, "We need
more Chevening scholarships", or, "We need to do the
kind of thing Nottingham is doing on a national scale"? Is
this not a missed opportunity?
Mr Kemp: I have a very strong
sympathy with your comment there. All I can say to defend myself,
being involved with this, is to say that it is as it set out to be.
It was looking at macroeconomic demand and the factors influencing
that macroeconomic demand. I was looking at it from a purely demand-driven
perspective. If you are then saying, "What about needs based
problems? Where are we looking at needs based problems?"
that is a separate issue.
Q66 Valerie Davey: But should it be for
the British Council? The British Council must not go back to being
"Britain PLC sale abroad". That I had hoped had gone
a long time ago. What I have been grateful for in all my visits
is that the British Council above all is listening in context
to the needs of local communities. If education here is just a
product to be sold to those who can afford it then I am sorry:
it is not what I am about. I do not think it is what any of us
should be about. Is that what you are saying, "We will only
supply it in order to bolster UK PLC and give education to those
who can afford it"? Is that the bottom line?
Mr Green: Not at all. We are concentrating
here on the macroeconomics and the financial elements of it and
that was very much the basis on which we were invited to come
along and talk to you about, based on the two documents, demand
and also The Global Value of Education and Training Exports.[9]
The British Council is much wider than this. This is only one
element of what we are doing and the Prime Minister's initiative
was very much targeted at 50,000 students from the non-EU sector.[10]
That is why the emphasis is on the revenue side and the fact that
these were fee-paying students by definition. In terms of the
range of work that the British Council is involved in, it is very
much about mutuality and mutual engagement and mutual benefit.
For instance, the leadership programme that we developed in Africa
to develop future leaders in Africa is not one in which they pay
anything at all. That will involve some 2,000 students over the
next three years going through a leadership programme which will
all take place in Africa but using UK expertise and African expertise.
That is just one example. I am sorry if it appears that that is
the emphasis of the British Council. This is just one element
of our very large range of cultural relations activities.
Q67 Valerie Davey: I know that. I am
glad to hear you say it. I have not read every page, I admit,
but where is the reference to the Open University? Presumably
the Open University is the university with the most international
students anywhere in the world, and they are mostly in Africa,
five million of them. That brings money into this country but
it is also an element which it seems to me is far more characteristic
of the work which you as the British Council, as opposed to your
report, are doing.
Mr Kemp: We have not gone into
the detail of individual universities and you are right: the UK
Open University has about 30,000 students globally who are all
outside the UK. They are all fee-paying.
Q68 Valerie Davey: Can I just check?
It is only 30,000?
Mr Kemp: Yes, the UK Open University
is 30,000 internationally. They might have got others through
licence agreements. It is a comparable number with the University
of London External, where there are also about 30,000 globally.
I strongly believe that in particular the UK Open University has
the potential to deliver in a range of areas, particularly in
areas like teacher education, but that requires some form of government
funding or government intervention if you are going to have a
needs based approach. As I say, I defend this on the basis that
I was asked questions purely about demand. If you are then going
to say, "Hey, where are the gaps? Where can we look for delivering?",
and if you are going to have a private sector driven approach
here, the gaps have to be where there are basic needs, which are
in health and education. That is something separate, which I will
willingly discuss with you because I think it is extremely important.
Q69 Valerie Davey: I am thinking of the
Government's millennium targets of getting every primary school
child into education by 2015, for which we essentially need teacher
training.
Mr Kemp: Absolutely.
Q70 Valerie Davey: Not only in what we
provide but also in the way in which we will learn from the teacher
training (which will be international, we hope) I was hoping,
I must admit, when I picked this up initially, that some of that
needs based interlinked departmental work would have come forward.
I think we have to criticise the Government, not you. They have
given you a specific remit. They have not given you much money
to do it. That is part of the problem, but presumably from your
international experience, because you have got that on the ground
experience which hardly any other organisation I can think of
has got to bring into that debate, did you not feel as you wrote
this that it was a lost opportunity, that there were aspects of
your work which were not reflected in a demand driven paper?
Mr Green: You raise an important
issue. Maybe we should have done more in terms of the context
setting because over 70% of all our activity, covering the nearly
half a billion expenditure that the British Council has in this
current year, is education based. The areas in which we are engaged
in terms of what you are alluding to are in helping ministries,
particularly in developing countries, to reform their education
systems to make them more fit for purpose for the 21st century
and we do that through discussions, through bringing UK experts
in to discuss ideas with them, and through bringing delegations
here to the UK. Recently we have spent a lot of time bringing
Iraqi presidents of universities to the UK to help them build
university relationships but also to raise their level of skill
and competence in the area of higher education. That is something
which has been very much welcomed by those university presidents.
We are doing a great deal in the education reform area using the
grant that we receive through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
This very particular bit of work was around recruiting those students
from the non-EU countries, as I was saying, and, as Neil has said,
this was demand-led in terms of looking at the trends in terms
of future international student places, but maybe you are right
in terms of not setting the context for the British Council.
Q71 Chairman: Can I just interrupt Val
for a moment? Do you not report on this sort of thing in your
annual report? You do an annual report?
Mr Green: Certainly, yes, and
that would give the whole range of activities and this would only
be one part of that and a relatively small part.
Q72 Chairman: You do an annual report
and does that include your plans for the future?
Mr Green: Yes.
Q73 Valerie Davey: I do appreciate what
you say. Every time you say, "We want to be the best of friends
with these people", but surely strategically there are a
lot of other countries where perhaps even more so we need to be
the best of friends. I am not against students coming and our
students doing exchanges; I think that is essential for global
peace, but when you are talking about the friends, at the moment
they are coming from the wealthier developing countries, not those
that are in the most need of education and potentially of making
those friendships. Even in the macroeconomics are we not going
to need those friends in countries which are needing to catch
up fast rather than those that are developing?
Mr Green: Absolutely, and there
are other vehicles through which we can facilitate that. This
is only one element. Through the scholarship programme that we
administer, the Chevening scholarship, and through all the exchange
programmes that we have, the school linking programmes that we
set up, the higher education links programmes that we have and
we administer on behalf of the Department for International Development,
there are many different mechanisms which help to ensure that
those friends for the UK are not just in countries where students
can afford to come to the UK. That is not to say that they are
not a very important group and an added bonus, but I agree with
you: we have to make sure that we build long term friendships
which are on a mutual benefit basis through mutual exchange across
the whole world. That is critical.
Q74 Valerie Davey: Given that we are
going to have apparently all these extra thousands of students
coming, would you suggest that the Committee ask in its recommendations
for more Chevening scholarships?
Mr Green: I think it would be
a very good thing, yes. I think they are a very good way of bringing
students into the UK and at the same time making friends for the
UK. There has been a recent review of Chevening which I do not
know if you are aware of, which was done externally, and that
is proposing a slightly different form of Chevening scholarship
which is not just to fund 1-year places but also to fund courses.
From the British Council's point of view the more students that
can come to the UK the better and if they can be, as you are suggesting,
ones who are not fee paying that allows us to reach those students
who have not got the means to do so.
Mr Butler: The largest growing
areas for students coming into the country are China and India
at the moment. They have increased by 80% over the last year for
which we have figures. These students are going to go back to
India and China and to other-developing countries and will be
helping the populations of those countries in the work of not
just poverty alleviation on the basis of education; these people
who are coming to the UK and may be funding themselves for postgraduate
study are going back to those countries and will be benefiting
the people in those countries as well. It is part of a whole spectrum
of opportunities which we are providing for people from those
countries.
Q75 Valerie Davey: Can I just add to
that Africa and Latin America and part of Asia? India, yes, but
there are a large number of countries who are represented by tens
rather than hundreds even, of students in this country.
Mr Green: We are engaged in teacher
training very extensively across the world and particularly in
developing countries and particularly in relation to English language.
That is an expertise that the British Council has developed over
many years and is something that is sought broadly. We are working
with associations of English language teachers and also helping
with the teacher training and development of materials in a number
of countries, including many developing countries.
Q76 Mr Chaytor: The discussion so far
has focused entirely on universities and now in the short report
that you sent to us, which was done by the professor from Lancaster
University,[11]
there is a reference to the estimated value in further education
from overseas students, but there is a cryptic comment here that
says that further research is recommended in this area. In your
opening remarks you gave us the figure of 25,000 FE students coming
into the UK. Why is it that further research is needed and what
is problematic about FE and is FE likely to share in the growth
scenarios that you have painted for HE?
Mr Kemp: The problem is how the
data is collected in the UK from the FE sector. In the main, colleges
will report to the Learning and Skills Council the data for the
courses that are supported in some way by the Learning and Skills
Council. A lot of international students in FE might be coming
on specially developed pathway courses, foundation courses or
ELT programmes that are outside the purview of the LSC, so they
are not easily captured. That is where the gap is, but we do know
on comparing like for like that 25,000 is there. It is just that
we believe it is a gross understatement because the data has not
been fully collected. We are working with the AOC and the LSC
to look at ways of getting a better impact on that.
Q77 Mr Chaytor: So you are confident
that there are at least 25,000?
Mr Kemp: Oh yes. That is on a
comparable basis.
Q78 Mr Chaytor: And in terms of rates
of growth for the future would you envisage similar rates of growth,
whatever the exact figure is at the moment, as would apply to
HE, or not?
Mr Kemp: It is a difficult one.
It is not as straightforward as HE. The biggest growth in FE has
been in the provision of programmes that lead into progression
to HE. In the countries where the growth has been strongest, India
and China, the skills based programmes, the technical skills and
vocationally oriented programmes, for a foreign provider to be
involved costs a lot more than a local provider and the rate of
return in the labour market between what students might get before
they had that skill and after is still relatively small compared
to the cost of the programme. Unless you have an intervention
by an aid agency, and this comes back to the discussion we were
having on needs based education and training, it is not going
to match.
Q79 Mr Chaytor: Will there be any growth
in FE?
Mr Kemp: Oh yes.
9 Note: See The Global value of Education
and Training Exports to the UK Economy, Geraint Johnes, Professor
of Economics, Lancaster University, April 2004. Back
10
Note: The Prime Minister's initiative was targeted on 75,000,
not 50,000 students from the non-EU sector. Back
11
Note: See British Council: Vision 2020: Forecasting
international student mobility-A UK perspective (P267/NLP). Back
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