It was a rare privilege for the students to have a royal visitor in their class talking to them about the English Premiership but Prince Andrew had an excellent time too. “It is good to see the Council doing what it does best,” he said.
There is no doubt that teaching English is what the Council is best known for. Most of our offices around the world have teaching centers where we teach English to members of the public and private corporations. We also work with governments and ministries of education training English teachers. Last year 10,000 Saudis studied English at one of the British Council’s teaching centers in Jeddah, Riyadh and Alkhobar and that number is set to rise to 15,000 once the extension to the Riyadh center is completed.
One of British Council’s global projects, ‘English for the Future’, seeks to raise the standard of English teaching and ultimately help young people’s career and employment prospects. ‘English for the Future’ also uses the British Council’s world authority in English and Education. The program works with governments and partners to provide training materials and support mechanisms for ministries of education in the Middle East to improve the standards of teaching English in the region. It also provides support for English Language Teachers (ELT) and professionals throughout the Middle East by setting up networks, bringing international English language experts to the region and encouraging local ELT specialists to present at regional and international conferences.
English, however, is not all we do. Since we opened our first office in the Kingdom in 1967, British Council has been providing a range of services to Saudi Arabia working closely with a variety of educational and cultural organizations in the Kingdom to support training and development initiatives and to broker partnerships and collaboration links. We also have offices in Jeddah, which opened in 1977, and Dammam, which has been operating since 1984.
We also believe that it is a crucial part of our mission to foster a deeper understanding of Saudi Arabia in the UK. We do this in a number of ways through our project work. For example, our ‘Connecting Classrooms’ project aims to promote cultural understanding, leading to a safer and more connected world and brings together pupils in UK and Saudi schools to work on joint projects and learn more about each other’s countries. Over 200 schools are now participating in 85 collaborative partnerships between schools in the Middle East and the UK.
Another project, ‘Future Teachers’, facilitated exchange visits by trainee teachers from Saudi teaching colleges to teacher training colleges in Edinburgh, Belfast and Aberystwyth. In return, delegations of students from Scotland and Northern Ireland visited Jeddah and Al Hasa and were amazed by the warm welcome they received and the deep friendships they were able to establish.
“The reality was so different from the media image that we are presented with back home” wrote one. “The experience has taught me that despite superficial differences, essentially we are all the same.”
British Council also works closely with technical and vocational training organizations in the Kingdom. Senior officials from the Kingdom’s Technical and Vocational Training Corporation have established close relationships with the UK and there are now established links between 20 further education colleges in Saudi and the UK. Representatives of UK colleges regularly visit the Kingdom and are working with their Saudi counterparts on quality assurance systems and skills and enterprise development.
A very significant part of our work in Saudi Arabia is exams. It is not such a long time since the administration of UK examinations formed a small part of British Council activity. For example, people wanting to study at a UK university would be asked to sit one of the predecessors of IELTS in a classroom, invigilated by a member of staff. Things have changed somewhat. This year, the British Council will run in excess of two million exams in over 100 countries worldwide and ‘Examinations Services’ is the primary source of income generation for the organization.
In the Middle East, the number of exams has risen from 68,000 in 2005/06 to almost 170,000 last year, more than doubling the volume in the space of four years. There are a number of factors behind this dramatic surge in demand for UK exams but perhaps the single overriding one is the need for access to internationally recognized and respected qualifications from globally renowned educational institutions and awarding bodies.
In Saudi Arabia, the number of exams sat with the British Council has risen from 25,000 four years ago to 50,000 today, in line with the regional trend. Like other countries in the region, the area of greatest growth has been the International English Language Testing System, better known as IELTS, which is the English language requirement for access to English medium university courses across the globe, including over 2000 in the United States.
Another route to international education is through school exams. Around 60 schools in Saudi Arabia have adopted an international curriculum leading to examinations at age 16 or 18 from the University of Cambridge International Examinations and Edexcel, administered by the British Council. These globally recognized IGCSEs and A levels are available in a very broad range of subjects and have been widely adopted by schools in the UK for their rigor.
As well as our work in education and training we also undertake a range if activity within culture and the arts. Last year, under the patronage of Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA) Chairman Prince Sultan bin Salman, we held a hugely successful exhibition of photographs and video work by British and Arab artists around the theme of traditional architecture in the Gulf Region. Thousands of people visited the exhibition in Riyadh and Jeddah and it received wide media coverage.
We have also worked with the literary clubs around the Kingdom on initiatives surrounding literature and translation and we took a large Saudi delegation to the London Book Fair when the Arab World was guest of honor. Saudi musicians, actors and playwrights have also been regular visitors to the Edinburgh Festival. This coming year we will hold an exhibition of pieces of Modern British Art from British Council’s own renowned collection. The pieces will be selected by Saudi curators who will be in London in June and displayed at the National Museum in Riyadh.
Like so many other concerned groups and organizations British Council has its environmental agenda. Our project, ‘Climate Generation,’ aims to increase understanding of the case for tackling climate change, increase support for the achievement and implementation of international agreements that address the threat of climate change and strengthen relationships and networks which lead to action.
The program identifies and trains talented young people to communicate climate change issues to their peers, the public and key decision-makers directly and via the media, encouraging positive action that needs to be taken on climate change.
At the same time an organization-wide initiative has encouraged the greening of our offices around the world. Elected ‘Green Champions’ in our offices have raised awareness among colleagues and we now recycle all our paper and have reduced water and electricity consumption. Over the last couple of months we have calculated our travel- and office-based carbon emissions with a view to reducing them by 10 percent by the end of 2010.
Over the years we have been in Saudi Arabia, we have been very lucky to enjoy the support of our Saudi partners in coordinating and supporting these activities. We have been aided, assisted and befriended by a huge number of people without whom our work would not have been possible. Our alumni network or Saudi scholars, who have studied in UK, some as far back as the 1950s, consists of thousands of individuals, many of whom have fond memories of their time in UK and who are keen to work with us in order to maintain these ties of friendship between our two countries.
We hope that the current wave of Saudi students, of whom there are now more than 20,000 in the UK under the very generous sponsorship of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah, will enjoy similar fruitful experiences and that they will return to Saudi Arabia to benefit their country with what they have learned.
