The Council's charitable objects include promoting "cultural, scientific, technological and other educational cooperation between the UK and other countries". This allows the Council to undertake activities in the UK as well as overseas though we found that it is not widely known that the Council operates in the UK itself. Overseas stakeholders are more aware and even argue for more activity in the UK to
strengthen the links. In the UK the Council does work in each of its three business areas, particularly education and languages. These programmes are mainly funded by the EU (won through competitive tendering) and HM Government.
Education
The EU has a number of EU-wide education programmes and the Council delivers several of them in the UK. These include the Comenius programme (intra-EU school-linking, provision of school language assistants, and professional
development attachments for teachers); Youth in Action (youth training and projects) and Erasmus (study or work abroad for higher education students). Erasmus will be replaced in 2014 by Erasmus+ which extends the programme to include vocational training. The Council recently won, with its UK partners, the contract to deliver Erasmus+ in the UK. We conclude that the Council is an effective partner for
delivering such major EU programmes in the UK and recommend that it should continue to do so.
The Council has been running its own school-linking programmes since around 2006, funded by FCO Grant-in-Aid and other Council resources. These are now merged under Connecting Classrooms with a previously separate DFID-funded programme. Over 5,200 schools and 936,000 students across the world have now participated. The aims of these programmes is to build school partnerships around the world; provide professional development on global issues for teachers; and enable schools to gain the British Council International School Award (which recognises achievement of an ethos of international culture, collaboration and learning). There are mixed views about impact. Some stakeholders credit it with raising the horizons of participating UK schools. However success is strongly
dependent upon the extracurricular commitment of individual staff and enthusiasm at the UK end can lag behind that of overseas participants. The DfE argue that the programme could be used more systematically particularly to learn more from the success of other education systems.
We conclude that the Council has a unique capacity role for promoting international school links of this sort and that this should continue through Connecting Classrooms. The Council is responding to the issue of
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Award but might do more with DfE to increase awareness of the programme. In this respect, we wonder whether the Connecting Classrooms mechanism might also be used, as a way of sharing experience.
Learning foreign languages in the UK
The British Council engages in support for the teaching of foreign languages in the UK both as a matter of policy eg through its recent report 'Languages for the Future‟ which highlighted the „incontestable need‟ for the UK to improve its language
capacity and practically eg placing language and teaching assistants in UK schools. Foreign language skills have direct relevance to UK prosperity and where a
particular language has been determined by the Government to be a priority, such as
Mandarin Chinese, the Council is well-placed to play a role. China and the UK have
shared strategic goals for their cooperation in education, including on learning Mandarin, directed through a series of Education Summits and agreements. BIS and Department for Education lead for UKG. The Council is an implementing partner on learning Mandarin and has launched a new programme, Generation UK (funded by BIS and the Department for Employment and Learning, Northern Ireland), which aims for over 15,000 UK students to participate in study abroad or internship
programmes in China by 2016. With funding from HSBC, British Council provides native-speaker Chinese language assistants in UK schools. These activities are quite separate from the efforts of the Chinese government through its network of Confucius Institutes (which are usually co-located in university campuses and tailor their language offer accordingly, eg the Confucius Institute for Business at the
London School of Economics which focus on business Chinese and offers a Chinese language proficiency test service).
We conclude that the British Council has relevant expertise to share with BIS and other interested government departments in assessing priorities for foreign language teaching in the UK and in designing effective UK
programmes, making best use of the Council's already established overseas networks and programmes. Consideration could be given to extending the collaborative approach developed for learning Mandarin to other priority languages. Given the recognised importance of foreign languages for
prosperity, we acknowledge that increasing activity in this area might require reprioritisation and reallocation of resources from other areas of Council work as well as resource mobilisation from other partnerships including the private sector. This area needs to be coordinated (and resourced) in cooperation with relevant UK and devolved Government departments.
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Work for and with the Devolved Governments and regional bodies via offices in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast.
The British Council works with the Devolved Governments both in relation to carrying out its overseas agenda, and in bringing an international dimension to educational and cultural activities in the UK (eg Belfast Festival, Derry/UK City of Culture). It helps bring international events to the regions (eg Womex Music Festival in Cardiff). It facilitates international exposure for young artists (eg joint-funding of the Artists International Development Fund in Northern Ireland); and manages scholarship programmes (e.g. Northern Ireland Government programme of scholarships to US universities).
Feedback shows that stakeholders value access to the Council‟s global network and see it as a cost-effective means of building overseas links and to promote their distinct education systems and cultural identities. However, some „devolved‟ stakeholders also feel that Council global programmes can be too „London centric‟ and that support from overseas offices can be inconsistent and of variable quality.
We recommend that guidance to overseas offices on doing business with the Devolved Governments and regions should be refreshed and recirculated regularly taking into account that British Council staffing overseas is highly localised and the UK's governance arrangements are complex.
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