BC teachers deserve transparency! 

The TEFL Workers’ Union has submitted a Freedom of Information request to the British Council. The days of English Online (EOL) teachers getting passed back and forth from the BC to Impellam just to get basic information are over. Our union is here to shed light on how the BC really functions. 

Our union is proud of our growing membership amongst online teachers at the British Council. And with every new member comes a new issue that the BC has failed to address. 

Anyone who’s taught online at the BC knows what it’s like to be ping-ponged back and forth from the BC to Impellam, with both organisations sending you to the other. Some teachers have come to us having never been told who their line manager even is. How can anyone be expected to do their job – let alone raise an issue or concern – when your employer won’t tell you who your manager is?

But, where the BC has let down teachers, the union has stepped up. We’ve submitted a 25-question Freedom of Information request to the British Council.

In it, we’ve queried a number of issues, including:

• The number of students, teachers, and IELTS examiners year-on-year
• The profitability of the English Online program
• Whether teacher data is being used to train AI
• Questions about management salaries
• Information about risk assessments
• More detailed information on the relationship between Impellam and the British Council

If you work for the BC and you’re interested to see the full text of our request, send us an email at [email protected] and we’ll gladly share it with you. 

We’ll also be sharing the BC’s response to the request on our website and social media. The BC may not believe in transparency but we do.

This is not the first Freedom of Information request our union has taken up with the BC.  From those previous experiences, we know that the BC has an entire team of lawyers whose job it is to evade any legitimate questions put to them. 

We fully expect the BC to try to weasel out of answering any difficult questions. We’re happy to have that back-and-forth with them, but we also know that legal processes are no substitute for workers being organised.

We can – and we will – force the British Council to be honest and straightforward with its teachers when we have the numbers to do so. If you’d like to help us hold the British Council to account, drop us a line at [email protected] to get involved.