British Council

The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations.

The British Council creates international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries and builds trust between them worldwide. We call this cultural relations.

We build trust and understanding for the UK to create a safer and more prosperous world. In terms of our reach and impact, we are the world’s leading cultural relations organisation. Cultural relations is a component of international relations which focuses on developing people-to-people links and complements government-to-people and government-to-government contact. We use English, Arts, and Education and Society – the best of the UK’s great cultural assets – to bring people together and to attract partners to working with the UK. The British Council has over 7,000 staff working in 191 offices in 110 countries and territories.

British Council Sri Lanka

We have been working in Sri Lanka since 1949, offering a wide range of services and activities across the island, through our offices in Colombo and Kandy. We have over 25,000 library members, which is the largest membership in the British Council global network. We are committed to delivering improved services to our library membership and have recently opened a new state-of-the-art library in Colombo featuring the best of British literature. We also run one of the largest English language centres and examination operations in our network, which has over 100 offices worldwide.