British Council’s shared services in India: smart cost-cutting or cultural misstep?

Educator and journalist William Grice shares his experience with teacher recruitment through the British Council.

Last year, I was poised to join the British Council, a prestigious royal chartered charity with global teaching operations. Suffice to say, I was thrilled. The British Council isn’t your run-of-the-mill school, after all.

Classified as an ‘executive nondepartmental public body’, or a QUANGO in layman’s terms, its mission is to enhance the UK’s global reputation and influence in arts, culture, education and English.

Saddling this educational body with cultural diplomacy isn’t necessarily ideal given that its teachers often go years without a pay rise, and the British government provides only 15% of funding, but more of that later.

Colonial echoes in modern times: British Council’s shift to India

This past summer, the Gazette covered how teachers at British Council Taiwan were considering a historic strike due to stagnant pay rates spanning 20 years.

In response to the strike action, the British Council have said they believe their teacher package is ‘very competitive in the market and is reflected in our high teacher retention rates and new full-time applicant recruitment rates’. Despite this, one teacher in Taiwan claimed they could ‘make more as a teaching assistant at the local international school’.

Additionally, 100 teachers were left behind in Afghanistan to make their own way out following the Taliban takeover in 2021. Thankfully, nearly all of them have since left safely.

These issues, however, are just the tip of the iceberg. My own experience with teacher recruitment and subsequent investigations revealed further challenges within the organisation.

Through a freedom of information (FOI) request, I uncovered that the British Council had offshored much of its finance, human resources, and IT support operations to Noida, a city in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Just as the British East India Company once relied on native clerks to facilitate its colonial enterprise, the British Council now delegates the cut and thrust of business administration to the same subcontinent.

With its critics accusing it of perpetuating linguistic imperialism and exploiting its teachers, this is hardly a good look.

Indeed, I wonder if the British Council’s Board of Trustees, like their colonial predecessors, displayed orientalism in choosing India to host shared services.

Through this lens, Afghan teachers and Indian administrators might be viewed as the “other”, whose human needs and professional dignity could be overlooked by a senior leadership team and Board of Trustees preoccupied with cost-cutting.

Whatever the case, beside the choking traffic of the Noida-Greater Noida Expressway, lies the Advant Navis Business Park, an oasis of high-rise offices and air-conditioned amenities. Here, BC Management Services Private Limited (BCMS), a subsidiary of the British Council’s investment holding company, began providing multiple shared services in 2010.

What does this mean? Basically, HR services that used to be handled by British Council staff worldwide were now managed by teams in Noida, working with, and sometimes overseeing, third-party operators in Madras, Bangalore, and Hyderabad.

Granted, decision-makers likely considered operational needs, costs, tax efficiency, and available skills base in Noida. The British Council confirmed to the Gazette that the Shared Services Centre in Noida was indeed established to ‘make cost savings in our “back office” functions such as finance and IT’ in order to ‘protect spending for our programmes around the world’.

However, the influences of orientalism and globalism, alongside government penny-pinching, certainly raise questions.

Some outsourced services predated 2010, others were introduced that year, but throughout this period, the British Council’s IT department, then known as Global Information Services, managed a Global Service Desk (GSD) for organisation-wide IT and finance queries.

Major issues followed that reflect some of my own experiences with the recruitment process.

Unveiling HR failures

It’s often said that while the British invented bureaucracy, India perfected it, so perhaps it’s no surprise that several years after establishing a shared services centre in Noida, costs rose and quality declined, according to evidence seen by the Gazette.

British Council documents reveal that as early as 2015, Adrian Greer, then Chief Operating Officer, was reportedly ‘Very concerned about costs and wants to see reduction. Not clear about what we do and why there are so many of us.’ Meanwhile, Andy MacKay, then Head of Global Network Operations, shared similar concerns.

FOI records clarify that these were perceptions from a Stakeholder Analysis exercise regarding the IT department, not direct quotes from the individuals. Nonetheless, they still expose serious doubts about certain teams in Noida.

Let’s dig deeper: in 2017, Veena Sinha, then Director of the British Council’s Global Information Services in Noida, wrote a GSD Strategy paper seen by EL Gazette that vividly exposes six years of failings based on complaints from across 110 countries. One striking issue identified was ‘too many hands’.

Speaking to the Gazette, the Council called the strategy paper ‘considerably outdated’ and claim that ‘since 2018, significant cost savings and service improvements have been delivered. The service desk performance was consistently above 4.5 on a scale of 5 throughout 2023.’

However, the GSD team was also reported by Sinha as displaying deficient understanding of British Council culture, relied excessively on scripted responses, and caused unacceptable delays in resolving HR issues.

Sinha highlights the challenge of poor language proficiency, lamenting, ‘spoken English is an issue. Most of the countries complain that they don’t understand what GSD says.’

This mirrors my recruitment experience where spelling errors in my interactions with some Noida staff cast doubt on their credibility; ironic, given the British Council aims to promote cultural understanding and English language learning.

Despite this, the British Council told the Gazette that in 2023 they ‘consistently achieved customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores average of above 4.5 on a scale of 5 in each quarter’ and they say these scores are a ‘direct reflection’ of customer experience with the Shared Services Centre.

Moving into 2018-19, the British Council adopted a more in-house model in a bid to improve things, supplemented by a small team in Poland. However, my experience with teacher recruitment in 2023 suggests some issues with Noida-based teams persist.

FOI records blame the GSD team for specific challenges, while Greer and MacKay presumably held broader concerns, yet the British Council seems reluctant to anywhere address the possibility that systemic and culturally ingrained issues in India’s work culture are at play.

The crux of the matter is that a government-backed body could be seen to be using English learners and teachers to fund the UK’s cultural diplomacy, while outsourcing less-desirable tasks to administrators in a developing South Asian country, all in the name of cost-cutting.

Yet Sinha’s strategy paper also shows expenses in Noida exceeding industry standards, reaching £3.109 million in 2016-2017 with an increase to £3.674 million forecasted for the following year.

Since the British Council’s funds come primarily from teaching centres and exams, I worry that this may have diverted resources from dedicated teachers and their students elsewhere.

In Sinha’s defence, FOI records show costs fell from 2018 due to improved self-service and productivity, and by March 2023, shared services roles in Poland were reduced from four to zero.

However, in October 2023, the British Council signed a £78 million agreement with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an Indian conglomerate, to overhaul various administrative functions over five years, extendable by two more.

Just why an overhaul was needed with costs down and productivity up is unclear; meanwhile, dividing £78 million by five suggests an eye-watering £15.6 million annual spend.

I can’t tell you whether all the issues in Sinha’s strategy paper were resolved, but FOI records do indicate that no internal assessments or audits were conducted between 2018 and 2023 regarding the outsourcing of Noida operations to TCS, despite employing 742 staff there.

This is an oversight I find troubling.

My recruitment rigamarole

Last summer, I applied for a position in Vietnam and was excited to receive an interview and job offer; however, my enthusiasm quickly faded as the recruitment consultant grew unresponsive to my emails.

Eventually, a teaching coordinator in Saigon took over arrangements, but it was striking how heavily the recruitment process depended on Indian workers for everything from coordinating interviews to managing HR queries and conducting screenings.

According to Dr William Pearson, a lecturer at the University of Exeter and former British Council manager: ‘Tata will need to understand well the brief, and this is necessarily going to vary according to the diverse contexts the [British Council] operates in.’

He adds that, despite potentially reduced oversight, it’s hoped that centre managers will receive the right teachers.

My experience, characterised by poor communication and the initial absence of a requisition ID, leaves me doubtful—particularly since my HR-query appeared to be managed uncomfortably close to the recruitment process, with my own recruiter ultimately responding.

Consider another instance: while British Council Vietnam graciously footed the bill for my DBS police check, their counterparts in Noida splurged on additional certification from First Advantage Europe Ltd with scarcely a nod from me. Both certificates now sit in my drawer.

The Gazette spoke to the British Council for clarification on how this might have happened. They have insisted it is ‘entirely false to suggest that these checks would have been carried out without prior consent’.

‘Safeguarding is of paramount importance to us and therefore enhanced screenings are carried out for teachers who are likely to work with children and vulnerable adults,’ said a spokesperson for the British Council.

‘These are comprehensive background checks which also require candidates to provide evidence of employment history, education, academic and professional qualifications, and professional references in addition to an up-to-date criminal record check […] these enhanced screenings also provide information on a global level, drawing on both UK and international databases.’

Following this response, I decided to reach out to First Advantage and the Council in order to request evidence of DBS consent and clarification of their process. As of writing, I have yet to hear back.

Worryingly, I’m not alone in my bewilderment. A teacher I spoke to shared similar frustrations, noting new teachers don’t generally say good things about the recruitment process.

Given these concerns, I believe the government should consider funding a single shared services centre in Britain and use some of the British Council’s excess funds, returned from 1987 to 2020, to provide inflation-busting pay-rises to teachers worldwide.

Establishing a nearshore administrative centre in a low-cost country like Poland with better-trained, English-proficient workers, could also be advantageous.

As it stands, the British Council’s Board of Trustees have evaded proper journalistic scrutiny on Noida, and I intend to rigorously examine their decision-making moving forwards.

But for now, I’ll let you, my readers, interpret the actions of the British Council and my recruitment rigamarole as you wish.