Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-140)
BRITISH COUNCIL
& FOREIGN & COMMONWEALTH
OFFICE
23 JUNE 2008
Q120 Mr Dunne: Turning to the income
you generate from exams, could you clarify for us the relationship
that you have with existing British exam boards and the extent
to which you are complementary or compete? I understand you have
essentially a joint venture arrangement with Cambridge University,
is that right?
Mr Davidson: We have joint ownership
with Cambridge of the one exam, which is the IELTS examination,
which is this tripartite arrangement with ourselves, Cambridge
University and IDP. That is the only examination where we have
a direct interest in the exam itself. Otherwise, we provide a
service to British examination bodies and make that available
to all examination bodies. So in various different markets and
different countries we certainly support Cambridge examinations,
we are a significant deliverer of the ACCA examination, we deliver
examinations on behalf of other examination bodies including Edexcel
and City & Guilds, and we provide a service for individuals
who are wanting to take examinations where we might have had a
direct relationship. So, for example, with individual leader universities,
if someone is wishing to take university exams then we would offer
that facility as well. Also in certain markets, in particular
markets like Pakistan, we deliver a significant number of IGCSEs.
Q121 Mr Dunne: In Gaza, I think you
said, you have recently had a facility torched. In aligning with
Government's strategic priorities, obviously finding a settlement
to the Middle East difficulties is an important one. I was in
Gaza last autumn and went round schools which were run by the
UN. Have you given any thought to taking a more proactive role
in areas like Gaza or the West Bank or some of the refugee camps
in Syria or Jordan?
Mr Davidson: We have offices in
Gaza, Ramallah and East Jerusalem; we also have offices in Damascus,
Aleppo, Beirut and in Tripoli. So we do have offices across the
region, and areas of work like support to schools, support to
English language, but most particularly important, providing the
opportunity for young people in those regions to have access to
the outside world is very much the core of our role.
Q122 Mr Dunne: But you do not consider
extending your role into running schools, either with support
from the UN or the British Government?
Mr Davidson: We have not considered
that, no. I am not sure I would feel we had the skills in the
organisation to be able to run effectively basic schools.
Q123 Mr Dunne: But you do run schools.
I am very surprised that my colleague, Mr Davidson, did not pick
this up because it follows the line of questioning he was going
down. On page 21, in Figure 10, it says you run a fee-paying school
in Spain and have since 1940, so you run a private school in Spain—
Mr Davidson: We do.
Q124 Mr Dunne: --- but you are not
prepared to consider running schools in parts of the world which
are closer to Britain's strategic priorities?
Mr Davidson: We run one school
as an organisation and it has been a school which we have run
since 1940.
Q125 Mr Dunne: Sorry, so you do not
still run it? You do still run it?
Mr Davidson: We do still run it,
yes, we do. It is a school which we have historically run for
over 65 years but it is very much sui generis, it is very
much a one-off, and it is not a method of cultural relations which
we would see ourselves necessarily wishing to repeat elsewhere.
Mr Dunne: Thank you.
Q126 Chairman: I am a great enthusiast
for the French Government system of having a French Lycée
in every capital city. It has been enormously influential in spreading
French culture and ethos around the world and creating a cadre
of people who understand the French language. I went to the Lycée
for a time in London, all my children have gone there, it has
an all-ability intake and heavily subsidised fees. You mention
this school in Madrid but it has always been a mystery to me why
you have not created all-ability schools around the world. It
is one thing to summon in young people for a few English classes,
but if you can get them young, like the Jesuits, you can get them
on your side forever. Why have we never developed the equivalent
of French Lycées around the world funded by the British
Council? They would be hugely over-subscribed.
Mr Davidson: We at one point did
look at the possibility of expanding our schools operation. I
think it is one of those stables where the horse has now bolted.
Q127 Chairman: What do you mean?
Mr Davidson: There are a large
number of British schools now in different parts of the world.
Q128 Chairman: A lot of them are
quite expensive to get into. They are very much more for the elite,
the international elite. I would have thought creating an all-ability
intake, heavily subsidised schools, as the French do, would do
so much for British culture and extending British influence around
the world.
Mr Davidson: I do not disagree.
As far as I am aware, I am not sure that the resources are going
to be available. The amount of money the French put into their
lycées are very, very considerable and they are based upon
the right of French people anywhere in the world to get the same
education as they would get in France.
Q129 Chairman: That is not a bad
idea, surely? Certainly in the Lycée in London, a third
of the people there traditionally are French, a third international
and a third English. You could create a similar system around
the world so that English people working abroad would have the
ability to go to an English comprehensive school and it would
also be for local people to come along as well.
Mr Davidson: We simply do not
have the resource which is attached to the lycée system
in France, which is exactly the same as the per capita
support given to them as if they were in France. That simply is
not the case.
Q130 Chairman: You think it is a
good system, do you?
Mr Davidson: I think it has the
potential to be very powerful but at the moment I am not sure
I see the—
Chairman: That is the best sort of "Yes"
one is ever going to get from a senior official! Mr Mitchell and
then Mr Bacon have supplementaries.
Q131 Mr Mitchell: Of course some
of the public schools have set up franchise operations in China.
Mr Davidson: Yes, they have.
Q132 Mr Mitchell: I wish them luck
with the Chinese upper classes, they are as useless at business
as ours. My question is about higher education because there is
intense competition now between higher education systems in different
parts of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and us and between individual
institutions. The Grimsby Institute has developed a lot of very
fruitful contacts with China, with Chinese people coming here
and some of ours going over there. This is obviously good business
and a flourishing opportunity. Why are you only working with it
in India, as we have seen from the Report? Why are you not providing
a service for them which operates through you, rather than having
to set up their own contacts and sending their own expeditions
over, and then you can charge them a fee for it?
Mr Davidson: We do do precisely
that. We have a service which we offered to—
Q133 Mr Mitchell: Just in India.
Mr Davidson: No, globally. It
is not in every single country—
Q134 Mr Mitchell: The Report instances
India.
Mr Davidson: The Report has one
particular instance in India but we do have a programme, it is
called the Education UK Partnership and individual institutions
are members of that, and it is everything from higher education,
further education and language schools. I am pretty certain, but
I will check, that Grimsby is a member of that and will be drawing
upon support from the British Council. It would be foolish for
me to pretend it is just the British Council which drove the increase
in numbers in China, but I personally was there in the mid-90s
when we had only 1,500 students coming to this country and I was
told by institutions there was no market there. Through the efforts
we have made with those institutions we now have 60,000-odd students
coming to this country. The same is true with a whole range of
partners.
Mr Mitchell: Thank you.
Q135 Mr Bacon: I was very pleased
by your answers on the Customer Relationship Management points
in the Report, because when I first read paragraph 3.16 which
talks about things you could not do I thought I was going to read,
"Oh my God, here comes another dreadful IT project",
but instead I found you had spent very little money and you were
very sceptical, which I have to say warmed the cockles of my heart.
I would like more answers like that and your scepticism, I suspect,
is well justified. Indeed, when you say the requirements are not
well defined, it says that one of the risks to it is that user
take-up may be slow, well if they have not got something people
want plainly it will be slow. Is it possible, and it mentions
in 3.15 that various Excel databases are in use, that if you are
slow enough—as in paragraph 3.18, " ... if the Council
does not soon define a corporate solution, regions will develop
their own ... ."—but keep on pumping out good advice,
for example, sensible, really useful templates of all the things
that anybody would want to know on an Excel database, you can
get basically more or less where you need to go without spending
any serious money at all? Or is your business too big for that?
Mr Davidson: I think there would
be real benefits, as I think Mr Burstow pointed out, if we were
able to draw on data across the whole world, but I do not want
to spend millions of pounds to be able to do that. That is why
our pilot programmes are looking at what it is we need to know,
what it is our customers want to know from us, and to what extent
we are going to be able to stay in touch with them and how we
build a sufficient understanding which allows us to have a long-term
relationship. It is not a one-size-fits-all, either in terms of
the type of people we are working with or indeed different parts
of the world, and different cultures have completely different
approaches as to how they want to stay in touch with big organisations
like ours.
Q136 Mr Bacon: Thank you. I am sure you
have come briefed for this question, which is about your font.
You spent £50,000 on it. Apparently, according to your spokesman,
you saved £500,000 and "Without a bespoke font every
user and every supplier in the 110 countries we operate in worldwide
would have had to have bought legal versions of Century Schoolbook
and the Universe fonts previously used". I have been counting
up, I reckon I have got access to 11 legally-owned copies of Century
Schoolbook and Universe knocking around on various different computers
I have got, some of them in the shed, but they are all legal.
Did you really need to do this?
Mr Davidson: Certainly at the
time the view was that it was value for money to have this font,
that it was wholly owned by us.
Q137 Mr Bacon: Was the decision taken
to spend the money or was the commissioning done before you became
chief executive?
Mr Davidson: The commissioning
was done before I became chief executive, nonetheless I am not
going to abrogate all responsibility as I was a member of the
executive board which took that decision.
Q138 Mr Davidson: Can I ask a further
point about the work you do under contracts. Just to clarify,
what sort of work is that and can I ask whether or not that has
an impact upon the general ethos of the organisation?
Mr Davidson: The sort of work
we are doing under contract is generally development programmes
on behalf of mainly either DFID or the European Commission. They
are critical components of our work because, particularly in parts
of Africa, parts of Central and South Asia and parts of East Asia,
they provide access to a very wide range of people who otherwise
we would have quite a lot of difficulty in contacting. The programmes
we work on are principally in the areas of education, law and
development of civil organisations; those are the principal areas
in which we work.
Q139 Mr Davidson: Can I just clarify
the question of contracts from the EU Commission. I take the view
they are generally a bad lot and I want to clarify whether or
not there are any rules that they lay down that would not be applied
to, say, contracts from the UK, whether you have to fly the flag,
whether you have to have a logo on all the stuff. Are there any
issues that perhaps imperil the concept of you being the British
Council, because you are not the EU Council, or are you when you
are working for them?
Mr Davidson: I am not aware of
any particularly onerous obligations they place upon us other
than they are extremely difficult sometimes to get repayment from.
No, I think the programmes are tendered in an open way and we
are very clear in applying for those tenders the conditions under
which we will attempt to deliver them.
Mr Davidson: Thank you.
Q140 Chairman: That concludes our
hearing. Thank you for all you do, we are very grateful for the
work you do on our behalf around the world, and your staff, please
thank them.
Mr Davidson: Thank you very much
indeed.
Chairman: Thank you.
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