University of Sydney: Human Trafficking Criminal wwww.ielts.agency 69
The issue of racism among IELTS staff is the subject of Part 2 of this research series. It is evident
beyond doubt that IELTS’s commercial marketing material is overwhelmingly targeted towards
persons of non-white racial origins. This claim should be clear to any person who uses Google
images to search for official IELTS marketing material using search words such as ‘IELTS’, ‘IDP
Education’ and ‘Official’. Using targeted search words and statistical sampling methods, I
estimate that IELTS’s official marketing resources portray models that are of Arab, East Asian,
South Asian, African and ‘dark’ Latino appearance in no less than 90% of all images.
Fake charity
There is nothing charitable about the IELTS services offered by Cambridge Assessment, IDP
Education and the British Council. As a collective, these entities accrue more than (estimated)
250 million dollars (USD) annually in economic surpluses for the sale of IELTS services and
products. Most of these sales are made to citizens of developing nations.
IELTS routinely claim that they “help” people achieve their goals in their public relations
communications and marketing propaganda. In this context, IELTS never mention information
such as the fact that they charge test-takers a commercial fee that is equivalent to the average
salary earned in one month by a Filipino nurse (Graham, 2017) for each test that their candidates
sit.