Send us your feedback:

The British Council hopes to make your experience of dealing with us an excellent and welcoming one.  Your views, suggestions, and details of satisfaction or dissatisfaction are important to us. This could be about the service you have experienced when contacting us, one of our exam delivery partners or using any of our products or services.  

Serious wrongdoing:

Use Safecall  to tell us if you witness or experience actions on British Council premises or by British Council employees, partners, or customers which:

  • affect the safety of children or vulnerable adults;
  • are harassment;
  • may be fraudulent.

Safecall is an independent and confidential way for you to report your concerns. It is available worldwide in multiple languages. You can contact Safecall by phone or by online form. You may choose to remain anonymous.

If you have concerns regarding anyone at risk of harm or abuse, you can also use our safeguarding concern report here.

Making a complaint:

If you wish to make a complaint, you can do so by email, letter, or telephone, however, we encourage you to make your complaint in writing wherever possible. 

All complaints should be made within 90 days of the date that the event occurred, or the date that the issue came to your attention. If your complaint is about your exam experience, we ask that you first contact the exam centre you registered with to take your English exam:

If your complaint is not resolved to your satisfaction, you may contact the British Council Amsterdam office via:

  • Online form 
  • By e-mail: complaints@britishcouncil.nl
  • By phone: +31 (0)20 550 6060 (Monday – Friday, from 10:00hrs to 16:00hrs)
  • By post: British Council,
                  Exams Operations Manager,
                  Raamplein 1, 1016 XK Amsterdam.

Handling your complaint:

We aim to resolve as many issues as we can the very first time you contact us. The member of staff you talk to will aim to see it through to resolution wherever possible, but he or she may need to liaise with other colleagues to make this happen.

In some cases, you may receive your response from the person or department responsible for that aspect of our work. In the infrequent cases where your complaint is of a serious nature, if you remain dissatisfied with our conclusion the matter may be escalated to a higher level. More detail surrounding this will be provided when we handle your complaint.

Remedies:

The general principle we follow is that complainants should, so far as possible, be put in the position they would have been in had things not gone wrong. Our aim is to provide practical remedies wherever possible. When we get things wrong, we will: 

  • Sincerely apologise and take responsibility.
  • Acknowledge and explain what went wrong and why. 
  • Endeavour to put things right without delay. 
  • Learn lessons from your complaint to improve our services.

What we will do:

All customers are dealt with seriously and impartially and are responded to promptly, regardless of the subject matter. We aim to respond to your complaint or feedback within 48 hours and have it resolved by the tenth working day after the date received. Complaints or feedback that are more complex may take longer to deal with.  In these cases, we will keep you updated on the progress.

We want to put things right for you wherever we can, and we work to resolve matters quickly and fairly. We will explain to you what went wrong and why and take action to remedy the situation. Sometimes, we can only apologise for certain situations, but we will draw upon your feedback to make recommendations for future improvements.

The information you provide will be kept according to the Data Protection Legislation which has been in force since 1998. The data you will supply will be used to help us improve our services. We will only use your contact details, if you choose to provide them, to respond to your comment. 

Confidentiality:

Please note that we can only discuss personal information and deal with complaints from the customer, for example, one of our exam’s candidates or the confirmed representative from an organisation involved in a British Council programme.

You may wish to have a third-party act on your behalf, which could be another person or organisation. Third parties may include advice organisations; professionals such as solicitors or teaching professionals, or family members and friends. Where this is the case, you will need to provide written consent to that effect. More information surrounding this can be obtained when you talk to us about your complaint.

Your complaint will be dealt with in the strictest confidence, in line with our Global Information Security and Privacy Policy. Information about you will be shared internally only as necessary to investigate and resolve your complaint. We will only disclose your information to third parties with your consent, or if we are legally required to do so.

Under UK data protection law, you have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold on you, and the right to ask us to correct any inaccuracies in that information.

For further information, contact us or visit www.britishcouncil.org/privacy.

External review:

If your complaint is of a particularly serious nature and has reached our highest internal level, when responding to you we will provide information on how to have your case assessed for investigation by our independent review body, should you remain dissatisfied. 

Accessibility:

If we are unable to answer your question directly, then we will guide you to someone in the organisation who can. If you have a specific enquiry but do not know who to speak to, we can put you in contact with the right person or team. Our staff are trained in the use of plain English, and we aim to make the information we provide as clear as possible. We are also able to provide information in alternative formats, should this be needed.

 

 

 

 

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