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Sponsorship falls dramatically
publication date: Jul 31, 2007
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author/source: R Taylor
The DCSF, under its previous moniker the DfES, promoted itself as the leader in developing sponsorship deals with the private sector. Under Estelle Morris it created a Business Development Unit which was run under contract by EdComs. At its peak the unit raised as much as £14m in cash and in-kind each year before the contract was awarded to Weber Shandwick (WS) in 2005. The WS team was run by Marcus Smith and intended to focus on the top 300 companies in the UK. Unfortunately this strategy seems to have failed with WS raising (by our estimates) just £586k in 2006. WS would claim a far higher sum, including the £12.4m donated by Philip Green, GUS and Marks & Spencer for the Fashion Retail Academy. However, when we reported this back in June 2005 the deal had already been under negotiation for several months prior to WS’s appointment. In the 2007 DfES report, the amount of sponsorship listed was just £60k from Intel for the Moving Young Minds seminar for international education ministers held in January. According to Malcolm Fielding of the DCSF who collated the details for the 2007 DfES annual report, the reason the figure has fallen so dramatically is that most sponsorships are now not with the DCSF, but with Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs or quangos as we prefer to call them). Unfortunately, Fielding was unable to say what these sponsorships might be worth or how we could find them out. If we did an FOI request to the DCSF and all of its NDPBs (all 30 or so), we might eventually be able to calculate a rough figure, but we doubt even this would stand up to much scrutiny. One we do know about is the £1.5m (of software) that RM is giving as sponsorship to 100 schools applying for specialist status with the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. The DCSF’s party line is that sponsorship income in education has risen dramatically as a result of the expansion of the Academy schools programme. We disagree and classify funds for Academy schools as philanthropic donations, because a sponsorship has to have a defined commercial outcome, something so far that none of the organisations who have paid £2m have been willing to admit to. www.dcsf.gov.uk |