It seems that the British Council isn’t making much progress in its quest to get the £197mn it owes to the FCDO written off. In the meantime, they are making cuts and selling assets. Speaking to the Foreign Affairs Committee a few days ago, CEO Scott McDonald said:
“…we are now selling everything the British Council has that we are able to sell. I talked about estates last time; we have 42 properties around the world and we are selling, or attempting to sell, every single one that is possible to sell. We are selling that bit of the art collection that we are able to sell under the terms of the museum code. We sold the school we had in Madrid. We do not have anything else.”
That school in Madrid, by the way, was sold for £50 million. It had been operated by the British Council since the 1940s. But even accessing the proceeds of the sale is proving to be tricky.
Test watchers might be asking if McDonald really is in the process of selling “everything” that can be sold. Given that the British Council’s IELTS operations in India were sold to IDP Education for £130 million just a few years ago, some might be wondering if we might see the rest of their IELTS business on the auction block in the near future.
The answer is: probably not.
Per the current agreement between all three IELTS partners (Cambridge, BC and IDP) the partners can only sell or transfer their share to one of the other founding partners. The British Council couldn’t, for instance, sell its IELTS business to a deep-pocketed competitor like Pearson or PeopleCert.
Meanwhile, IDP Education Ltd isn’t in a position to acquire expensive assets right now, especially one that might come with a price tag that exceeds its current market cap. And Cambridge, it is safe to assume, is content to continue developing the test while collecting a lucrative per-test fee from administrations carried out by the other partners.