The British Council has welcomed the report of the UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) into the way we use our resources, published on 11 June.
The NAO’s overall conclusion, based on a review of our work around the world, is that the British Council’s performance is strong and valued by customers and stakeholders.
Since 2006-07, the British Council has moved from country-specific cultural and educational projects to fewer, larger products, managed under a central commissioning process. The NAO records that early large-scale projects have seen increasing audience numbers, and rising customer satisfaction.
‘The British Council has already developed some innovative and well-received projects across its range of activities and its key business sectors: Art, English, Science, Governance and Education’, say the report’s authors. These include Connecting Classrooms, a £5 million project aimed at reaching over one million young people in Africa, and Climate Cool China, which will use workshops, exchanges, exhibitions, competitions and awards to raise awareness of, and promote ways to tackle, climate change in China over two years.
The British Council spends £95 million of grant funds a year on its programmes, but generating support and additional funding from local partners will be critical to its future success. As examples of cost-sharing to be developed the report cites the UK-India Education and Research Initiative project, which improves educational links between India and the UK and receives extensive support from Shell, KPMG, Glaxo Smith Kline, BAE Systems and BP, and the international volunteering programme, Global Xchange, which we run with Voluntary Service Overseas.
The National Audit Office accepts that our English language teaching and examinations business has a high reputation in the market and is financially successful, generating surpluses in some countries which we then use in part to support teaching centres in less established markets, some in the developing world.
It concludes, ‘A key part of the rationale for the Council being in the language teaching business is that it enables it to make a stronger contribution to developing the teaching of English in primary, secondary and higher education, and so fostering links between the UK and academic institutions in each country.
‘The Council has many examples of this synergy, which is clearly highly valued by foreign governments and authorities, and can yield high impact if better publicised, and, more widely replicated, such examples could defuse some of the concerns of stakeholders and competitors.’
Of course, we can always do better. While recognising that it is inherently difficult to manage an organisation dispersed to over 100 countries worldwide, the NAO stressed the need for a consistently high standard of project management if the benefits of large-scale regional and global working are to be fully realised.
The NAO also affirmed the importance of a Customer Service Excellence project that the British Council is running to improve standards of customer service across our network.
In sum, though, the British Council has been given a clean bill of health. ‘The NAO has produced a balanced and fair report and we’re delighted by its positive assessment of our performance,’ says Andrew Fotheringham, who led the British Council’s response to the NAO audit. ‘In the majority of cases, we’ve already identified the concerns highlighted and have begun to address them.’
Our Annual Report for 2007/08 will be published soon. For now, the 2006/07 report tells you more.
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