Research Analysts: Cultural Relations Impact

About the project
The Research and Policy Insight team plans to build on the Research Unit’s small but strong foundations to pursue a strategic programme of research that underpins and supports the cultural relations mission and sector engagement of the British Council, from Arts to Education and Languages and from Civil Society to Peace and Conflict Resolution, and that supports the British Council as a thought leader and provides evidence of the impact of our work in cultural relations.
The team aims to generate new, useful, knowledge systematically that helps ensure the British Council:

• is recognised, in the UK and overseas, for expertise and insight on cultural relations and soft power, and our contribution to policy is actively sought as a thought leader in our key thematic areas of expertise, including Arts, Education and Languages, Civil Society, and Peace and Conflict Resolution
• contributes to the discourse on soft power, inform policy, shape dialogue, engages our stakeholders in the UK and in the countries where we operate, and improves the impact and effectiveness of our programmes
• builds our capacity as an organisation to benefit from research, by ourselves and others, in order to make strategic decisions, engage with global research stakeholders, and to share insight and research findings to further our charitable purpose

About the role
The British Council is seeking a desk research and analysis service to collate, refine and augment its internal knowledge and evidence base on the wider benefits to the UK from our cultural relations activities across English language, education and society, and arts and culture interventions. This is in order to inform future strategy and to support the development of different policy and spending options in a tight fiscal environment in the UK.
One likely line of inquiry of this would be to understand the actual and/or potential benefits that arise from our work in teaching English and supporting English for Education Systems around the world in different scenarios. This could include benefits to the UK economy through marginal increases in trade, the contribution of English to economic and social development in different countries, the role of increased English usage in the ability to access certain UK cultural goods, and its relationship to trust in and attraction to the UK.

Please read the Request for Proposals (RFP) - scroll down to download a copy, and then if you are interested, please send relevant documentation (CV, cover letter, supporting documentation etc, as laid out in Section 12 of the RFP) by the deadline to reece.waldron@britishcouncil.org with the title: research analyst

Please note we will only respond to successful applicants within three working days of the application submission.