Online teachers and IELTS examiners speak out
As current and former British Council (BC) examiners and teachers, we’re writing this letter because we believe the BC and their agencies (in particular, Impellam) have created a toxic workplace culture through:
- a ‘feeding frenzy’ scheduling system that damages the mental health of staff
- bullying and unaccountable managers
- unclear employment relationships
- mistreatment of pregnant staff and new mothers
To rectify this, we want:
- clear, accountable, and transparent grievance and disciplinary procedures
- maternity and paternity policies that meet – and go beyond – the legal minimum
- a regularisation of how work is assigned
- all mandatory training to be paid
A toxic culture from the top
Teachers who speak up are more likely to be disciplined. We’ve seen the teachers who have raised concerns on Teams, only to have their teaching accounts terminated shortly after. We shouldn’t live in fear because we had the audacity to speak up.
The “feeding frenzy”
Teachers at the BC don’t have regular schedules. Instead, teachers have to book individual classes when they’re released as a block: “the feeding frenzy”.
Often, all available classes are gone in minutes. This means that if you’re teaching or having computer problems when hours are released, you can end up with no lessons at all.
This Uberfication of teaching needs to stop.
Mistreatment of pregnant workers and new mothers
There have been numerous instances of pregnant women and new mothers who’ve had to battle to get their basic legal entitlements.
More than once, it appears teachers were fired and rehired during their period of maternity leave. The BC and its UK employment agency, Impellam, have given confusing and contradictory explanations why. It speaks to an utter lack of care and respect for teachers that they were left in this state of limbo at such a crucial point in their lives.
In one harrowing instance, a new mother whose child was suffering from a severe illness had to stop teaching classes to take care of her new baby in hospital for a month. When the teacher sought assistance from the BC/Impellam, she was simply told that statutory sick pay could not be used if your child is sick. No further support was offered or even discussed.
No accountability and no recourse
Recently, the BC has introduced a warning system. This means that if our wifi is acting up and we’re late for a class, we can be issued with a warning. There’s no process, no appeal. Just a unilateral warning.
The BC can do this because they’ve engineered a system of outsourced employment. The result for us: we’re denied basic rights like access to a grievance procedure or protection from unfair dismissal.
Bullying managers – and the evidence to back it up
We know bullying is a loaded term, but we use it with good reason. Numerous teachers have taken out subject access requests and have seen communications between managers.
One of these teachers was Tony, a long-term teacher who worked directly for the BC for 26 years before joining English Online (EOL). He discovered that the then-head of EOL had instructed management to put him on ignore status on Teams. She informed the managers below her: “Don’t oil squeaky wheels.”
Another teacher found that in their subject access request, managers had discussed her complaints about mental health by putting scare quotes around the term.
Bullied…then patronised
When we’ve raised concerns, the response from management – sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit – is that teaching online is “just a side job”. But for most of us, it’s not. Yes, we love our profession. Yes, we care about our students. But we also have to pay the bills.
Unpaid training
IELTS examiners are required to undertake regular training to maintain our status as qualified examiners, but this is unpaid. We care about our skills, but the time that we put into building and maintaining those skills should be recognised. It’s not fair on us to require us to do something and then not pay us for it.
No one is your boss when you have two bosses
Despite every aspect of our jobs being controlled by the British Council, our employer is listed as the agency. Sometimes, the BC will claim that these are just payroll companies. Yet, when teachers have raised legal concerns, the BC claims that the agencies are the employer. All this means that, when we raise concerns, we’re bounced back and forth between the BC and the agency. Neither the BC nor the agency are willing to take responsibility.
Victimisation: Tony’s story
Tony was hired in summer 2021. He informed the BC at the time that he was based in Spain. Yet, in October 2023, he was told he was being dismissed as he “appear[ed] to be working from abroad.” Tony picks up the story from here:
“There was no contact from either the BC or Impellam to ask me to clarify my situation. I found out that I was no longer employed after unsuccessfully trying to logon to deliver my programmed classes. I had been blocked on the system and my account had been disabled with zero communication and zero notice. This coincided with a number of comments that I had recently posted on Teams asking for explanations about changes to working conditions.”
Victimisation: Marina’s story
Marina received consistent positive feedback from her managers and students and, during her early days at the BC, had a regular timetable.
But then the BC implemented the feeding frenzy and, in those early days, hours were regularly released in the middle of the night. The unpredictability left Marina anxious and suffering from insomnia: “I had to start taking antidepressants for the first time in my life.” She continues:
“Some teachers went from 25-30 hours per week to no hours for weeks on end. Teachers had to wake up at random times at night, cancel their other commitments to ensure they could book enough hours. If the hours were not released when management said they would be, they told us ‘try again tomorrow’. On top of that, there was a policy of automatic offboarding if a teacher didn’t teach for at least 4 hours per week.”
Marina was one of many teachers who complained about this. As a result, she was pulled back into a meeting with two managers. She was told her comments on Teams had been “rude” with one manager telling her “I just want to remind you that you’re an agency worker…”
Despite doing her best to put forward positive solutions for improving the scheduling system, Marina too was dismissed.
Like Tony, she also took out a subject access request:
“When I received it, I cried for days. Behind my back, the managers were mocking me. They were aware of the consequences of the ‘feeding frenzy’ on teachers’ mental health, but they preferred to fire people instead of solving the problem.”
The signatories
This letter has been written with input from over 25 current and former EOL teachers and IELTS examiners.
Some of us are willing to use our names. For others, we know the retribution that’s in store if management knows who we are. But we speak for ourselves and the countless others who have cried at their computer screens, been talked down to and been abused by British Council managers.
We’ve had enough.
Signatures
- RR
- EB
- IT
- AM
- KA
- RT
- MH
- IS
- CJ
- Tony Hastings
- JS
- Marina Goncharova
- AC
- CR
- JC
- AKB
- KS
- JF
- CP
- KJ
- JG
- Anonymous
- SD
- TA
- JT
- ED
BC Teachers Online 