I see where you are coming from Colin as working dedicated hours would show that there is a clear shortfall in manpower. However, once again, the only people that are really affected by this are the students!!!

 

We all know that SMT will not take responsibility for any errors or omissions in exams and all of the blame and responsibility will be passed to the exams team. And while we can argue this directly with the SMT the bottom line is the learners are disadvantaged. This basically puts us between a rock and a hard place.

 

I am very fortunate at the college I am at now that I have a large team of people, however, I have first-hand experience of an insurmountable role as my previous role in a school of 1300 students covered the following:

 

Exams (all types internal and external) – half an assistant here

Health and safety officer

Community engagement officer

Data Manager – 1 assistant here

Premises manager (estates) including managing caretaking team and catering staff

Educational Visits co-ordinator

10 periods a week (out of 25 periods) in the internal exclusion room

2 duties per day totalling 1 hour 30 minutes

Fundraiser (both informal and formal funding applications)

Administration Manager – front office staff

Timetabler

MIS Manager

 

It was fun to say the least, so I do sympathise with those who are expected to do the impossible!

 

 

 

Hi Cath,

It would seem that you and your team have been doing your jobs too well in the past, throwing in all those extra hours and dedication to ensure that everything runs smoothly and the needs of the students are always met (usually as a result of out of hours work).  I think that what is happening at your centre is a general reflection of what may be happening across the board – if not now then most certainly in the future.

Perhaps the only way to emphasise the amount done by your team is to ensure that only specified working hours are worked – there has to be an assurance of work-life balance after all, and this cannot be maintained if the amount of work needing to be completed is being undertaken by less staff.  The argument of the loss of the January Series is quite lame in my book. 

From what I have seen in this forum, your (England) involvement in Functional Skills (thankfully something we don’t do in Wales) far outweighs the amount of work needed for the January AS window. 

I suppose your SMT could argue that you will “need to work smarter” (lordy, how many times have we all heard that in the past) but sometimes it’s simply a case of the SMT trying to operate smarter themselves.  They quite often only see costs on a spreadsheet and a desire to reduce them, with no real understanding of what has to be done, by whom, and how.

You have my sympathies and I hope that it gets better for your team in the future.

 

 

 

 

Good Morning

 

I thought I would share with you what has happened over a period of time to the Exams Department here. 

 

Three years ago the department was made up of myself, a full time exams assistant, a part time 20 hours per week term time only Functional skills exams assistant and also a regular invigilator who came in whenever needed to deal with online exams.  This has now been whittled down to myself and 1 full time assistant, we have now been told that due to not having the January A Levels the exams assistant post has been cut to 0.5 and to make up for this shortfall in her workload a new post has been created which basically is the job she is already doing with the addition of dealing with various other tasks that were previously done by a member of the IS team.

 

Fed up doesn’t really cover it……

 

I have made it very clear that I will continue to do my job on a day to day basis but there is no chance of me ever being able to plan for the future or to look to improve the exams department in any way.

 

 

Cath Smith

 

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