Conclusions and recommendations
1. We congratulate the British Council for
its achievements in promoting the English language and culture
overseas, sometimes in difficult conditions.
The Committee noted that the British Council is a valued and valuable
organisation and thanked the Council's staff for their hard work.
2. The Council's English language teaching
operations are an important means of promoting English language
and culture overseas. However, the Council's current teaching
model, based on premium prices and concentrated mainly in capital
cities, severely restricts its reach.
The Council should implement lower cost and more flexible teaching
operations without further delay, in order to broaden its reach
beyond people able to afford its current premium prices. It must
strive to be genuinely inclusive when forging links between people
and organisations overseas, and in the UK.
3. The Council's programme of change has had
negative effects on its staff and their view of the Council's
leadership. It is right that the Council
should move its resources to better meet strategic priorities
and changing demand. In doing so, however, the Council should
identify ways to better communicate with, and listen to the views
of, Council staff.
4. The Council currently has no single customer
relationship management system, but we welcomed their decision
to minimise expenditure on a technical solution while the detailed
specification was still unclear. The Council
needs to move as quickly as possible to a single record of its
customers that all its businesses can use. In considering the
way forward it should not exclude the possibility of simple templates
based on its standard office software.
5. The British Council's sponsorship and partner
income has fallen year on year since 2000-01.
The Council should do more to reverse this worrying decline, especially
if it is to achieve its ambitious target of an annual 12% rise
in income over the next three years. In particular, it must reinforce
the consistent application of its sponsorship strategy across
its Country network and put more effort into involving UK and
Overseas Companies during the development of its new regional
projects.
6. The Council has pockets of good practice,
but there is a lack of consistency across the network.
The move to regionalisation should help to improve the spread
of good practice across the Council. Regional directors should
be the link between the corporate centre and the Region, and should
be held accountable for the performance of their regions, enforced
through their performance appraisals.
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