SEN export opportunities

• Article 7 of 15
• EducationInvestor, May 2012

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These partners can help in translating products into the native languages and will understand cultural issues that may require changes in products: NASEN's Lorraine Petersen points out products that feature pictures of women with exposed legs, for example, cannot be sold in Saudi Arabia. Many countries will also be poorer than the UK and customers unwilling, for example, to pay £49.99 plus the shipping plus import taxes for a CD ROM, says BESA's Ray Barker. By getting a partner distributor to buy in bulk, costs can be reduced and prices set at affordable levels as a result. Finding partners to help with exports is an area that the government's UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) agency is particularly keen on helping with. It has a system called the Overseas Market Introduction Service (OMIS): companies interested in trading in a given country can pay of fee of £500 or so in most cases to get a report written by staff of that country's UK embassy that identifies opportunities, details the country's educational system, reveals whether the country is ready for investment and can identify a number of potential partners for the company to work with in the country.

With a price tag of only £500 (although more elaborate requests can go as high as £9,800), it might be assumed that not much effort has gone into the work and so the report can't be trusted; there's also the potential for tactful 'whitewashes' of countries. Some of these fears are justified: the Sponsors' Alliance says that "feedback from exporters regularly suggests that the quality of OMIS reports is variable and often does not meet customers' expectations". However, McCusker says that in his experience the reports can generally be relied upon and don't gloss over problems. "We've had seven or eight done and we've rejected four countries for export because the reports said 'Not yet'." 69% of OMIS customers are satisfied with the reports they receive and 55% feel they the reports have helped improve their business performance, according to the National Audit Office.

But the big challenge for UK companies isn't going to be demand. It's going to be marketing. In many cases, countries and parents simply don't know what's available to help children with SENs. "They don't know what they don't know," says NASEN's Lorraine Petersen. "They have no concept of UK and US resources. I've sat down with parents in Malaysia, shown them product catalogues from the UK and they've been in awe because they didn't know any of these things existed."

It's clear that many schools, parents and governments in countries around the world, when they are aware of British SEN products, want to buy them. All that's needed now is time and evangelism - and that's going to take investment.

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