Webber Shandwick has won a contract to help the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) engage with big business. For the last four years this work had been part of the wider remit of DfES’s Business Development Unit that had been run on contract by EdCOMS Webber will run the unit as part of their existing Corporate Practice run by Marcus Smith and their focus will be on engaging the top 300 UK companies via sponsorship, partnerships and funding
This new structure and approach has not been embraced by all, particularly the 95% of all UK companies who fall outside Webber’s remit. Industry association and the SME sector in particular now say that they now have no effective channel through which to engage the DfES about initiatives and or opportunities that impact upon them. Whether this new strategy actually improves the links between big business and education, or whether it simply raises more sponsorship for the DfES is unclear at this point.
