EDDi Extra
What damage is Brexit doing to the UK’s brand image, an image any institution selling a UK education relies on.
Dear subscribers
By now familiar to you, from time to time, alongside our fortnightly digests, we publish short ‘EDDi Extras’ - the next is below (or in PDF format here).
This week’s is deliberately contentious. We consider what damage Brexit is doing to the UK’s brand image, an image any institution selling a UK education relies on. Feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments section. If enough people comment we will provide a summary and a response in a future EDDi Extra.
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OPINION PIECE
Brexit, International education and protecting the brand
By Dr Stephen Whitehead
Here is a question to put to your history students: ‘How old is the United Kingdom?’ Answer at the bottom of the page.
For sure, it is not as old as England, which kicked off around 927 AD.
And nor is the good old UK going to last as long as England. Indeed, it will likely break-up in my lifetime, and I’m no spring-chicken.
At time of writing, Brexit looks on the card; if like me, you consider that to be a disaster then prepare yourself for the next stage in this saga which is a second Scottish referendum. Once Scotland leaves the Union (and I don’t think this is an ‘if’) then not only will the GB flag need redesigning, so will UK international schools. We could in fact be swiftly returning to the ‘Kingdom of England’ which last existed in the 16th century and consisted of England and solitary Wales.
This may appear fantasy, but if you look at the many and varied iterations of ‘my nation’, the UK, over the centuries you’ll realise that permanency and stability were rarely present when it came to national identity.
But permanence and stability are important when selling international education, and right now the UK’s image abroad has rarely looked more tenuous. The health of UK international education is threatened not just by Brexit, but also the Labour government’s stated aim to ‘end charitable status of UK’s independent schools’.
‘The people I know in international education are saying, ‘we cannot believe a major political party is threatening independent schools given we are a global leader. That plays into a side effect of Brexit where people are beginning to look at the UK and the things they thought they knew are all called into question. (Caroline Nixon, general secretary of the British Association of Schools with International Students).
I recall MBA Edi (Keele University) lectures I gave to leaders of international schools some years ago. I introduced the concept of ‘soft power’ and explained its relationship to the job they were doing in international education. At the time, and for most years since, the UK has been in the top three countries for ‘soft power’. If UK international educationalists assume this to be a continued benefit for their schools then they are in for a shock. Soft power can go down quicker than it goes up. Why? Because it is all about vulnerable intangibles such as image, presentation, reputation, identity, and symbolic association. There is a lot to lose, as Colin Bell, CEO of the Council of International Schools, points out:
‘We know that 55% of the current world leaders have been through some form of British education, 38% of Nobel Peace Prize winners again have had a British education, 160 countries follow our GCSE’s and A-levels. So our heritage, our innovation, our reputation, is certainly unquestioned,’ (PIE, October 23, 2019)
As Bell notes, the question now hanging over British International Education PLC is ‘how British schools maintain their reputation, quality, safeguarding, innovation and how they continue to scale up as demand for the British brand of education increases.’
And that is precisely the point, international schooling is all about brands, with the bigger the brand name, the bigger the market potential. No surprise then, that even Gordonstoun is now committed to joining the long line of leading UK private schools heading to China - though if Scotland leaves the Union, then Gordonstoun will no longer be a UK school.
In the world of international marketing, branding is at best a delicate process with no guaranteed outcome, and Brexit is not helping sell the UK brand overseas while a break-up of the union will be nothing less than an existential disaster. The term ‘United Kingdom’ is no more than a statement of political optimism, and a relatively recent statement at that. Such political optimism and assumptions of fixed national identity that I and you grew up with are now fast disappearing.
British International schools which rely heavily on their association with the UK will need to consider this moment in history, re-examine their image, prepare in practical ways for momentous events and do all this very soon. This time next year it could very well all be over.
Answer: 1922 (see diagram)
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