A tough time - February 2010

After the last couple of weeks of madness thanks to social work and social care students in January I have been experiencing third year nursing and post-grad student madness recently. On top of the insane deadlines for this cohort of students I have been busy with the organisational demands of meeting our financial needs the good old Billing. This month I have managed to complete all of the Billing for January and get all the file records for every student up to date. This has been a number of very late nights but I have promised myself that I will be taking a week off to recover. I have been sending Red Letters out to very bad paying Local Authorities because I think that 12 months delay on payment of funding agreements is beyond of joke. I think RED paper is getting the message through as I have had a couple of apologetic phone calls but I am still waiting upon payment.

As soon as some of money hits the bank account I will be down to the accountant so that we can get the end of financial year accounts done since they are horrendously over due. This also means that things like the additional National Insurance payments will have to be made.

There is officially something like three weeks to spring and I want to be personally and organisationally in a better frame of mind by then. They say that the first two years of a company are the most stressful and I would agree with them at the moment. We are yet to see the financial benefits which our business plan suggested we would get but we can see the income stream there in the accounting books.

The last eight months have been some of the toughest but we have managed to stay together as group even though we are all experiencing a high level of stress thanks to the disjointed payments and our personal financial crisis. I think the collective has also helped as we have been able to network ideas and talk to each other over the workplace dilemmas which we are faced with on a regular basis. As soon as we get our heads above the water line I am planning to have a recognition event so that everyone effort is acknowledged.

When working with students I think as support tutors we forget the personal support input we have with students. Just our presence in their week can help students to bounce ideas and have the reassurance to discuss academic dilemmas. Sometimes we hear the personal and this is were an academic support tutor must remember to signpost the specialist services such as welfare and counselling. We get to know our students and often we can be their own encouraging face in the week in a world which seems to bombard them with demands and responsibilities.

Action plan

• Remember to smile and keep on trucking
• Your smile will be answered with a smile
• Student surprise you when your simple smile brightens their day.

Snow affecting play - January 2010

Thanks to the snow at the start of the year we again faced further financial restraint combined with absolute panic from students who were relying on the access to campuses during the Christmas break from teaching to complete their dissertations. The snow has also affected the payment systems for many authorities so we are still up the creek without any payment which makes paying organisations like the HMCR very difficult if there is nothing in the tank. We are all going to incurr the £100 fine for overdue submission but I can pay if I have not been paid myself. On paper we have made a profit but the reality is we have yet to see it.

Social work and Social Care students have been driving all of us a little crazy but it has not been their fault. I think these students are hit by the double whammy of their course with its requirements of practice placement and faculty who cannot seem to plan the loading of assessment.

How hard would it be during the semester before all the module books are completed to lodge the proposed submission dates and then take a test group of students in the faculty to assess whether these dates clash with each other or place unreasonable demands on the student population. I think demanding 10 pieces of work 6,000 to 8,000 words in length in a period of 4 weeks is totally unreasonable on top of class attendance, weekly course work submissions, group presentations and individual presentations. This type of workload is physically not possible for single students with no family commitments but the department needs to recognise that a large proportion of their student population are mature aged students who are juggling work and family commitments while undertaking full time study. The backlog in loan payments and lack of additional funding available for these parents means that they do have to take on additional work to achieve their educational dreams. Allowances of less than £100 pounds a week do not feed and clothe a family of four.

How we ask individuals to undertake further professional development needs to recognise that the days of the family supported young student are long gone. Yes there are still a large percentage of HE students who come from FE colleges but the funding support from families has disappeared. Even middle class families are struggling to make their commitments in the current economic situation.

Many students are adults returning to education to retrain to meet the workplace requirements. The current financial situation in this country is another factor why so many are returning to education as there is just not enough employment out there and these individual’s have families to support. So students are struggling to make ends meet, do academic work which does not recognise the demands they have on them and prepare for placements.

Xmas Snow - December 2009

Again we are still rolling with the punches and dealing with the continuing funding chaos of Student Finance England. This month we are still plagued but the dreaded funding dilemma but fortunately for all of us the funding from the institutions are covering the demands we have.

The recent snow days leading up to Christmas provided bad weather to the point we could not get on to campuses but also provided an opportunity to undertake other activities which the recent hassles have caused to be placed on the back burner.

A lesson from the weather has been if you can not do that, move onto what you can do. A reminder for us when working to students to try a range of approaches which breaks the work down into manageable chunks and enables students to chip away at the work.

The snow also provided an opportunity for me to review what we have been doing as an organisation and this included reviewing the system logs. Yes big brother or in this case sister is watching you. We seemed to have forgotten in the technologically advanced society we live in when to switch off, unplug and unwind. Looking at the logs it appears that everyone is getting some rest during the week and managing to get see all their students without too much trouble.

Sometimes we need to unplug ourselves from the grid. Today's constant connectivity is causing untold amounts of pressure of individuals. Personally I am fairly strict in my own personal life about the use of mobile phones, social networking activities and email. My students when I start working with them get the rules laid down about my work mobile phone. Yes it is my primary contact but after 8pm and before 8am forget it, I do not answer it. Send a text I will look at it when I have chance, and if it appears to be an emergency I will get back to you as soon as possible. In the house if the phone (mobile/landline) goes during meal times we just ignore it. It was important they will call back another time.

Working with many students I find that they can not stop and focus on the activity we are doing they have to remain connected to their smart phone. Hello I thought we were here to work on your academic work not to be repeatedly interrupted by beeps and tweets. Talking to students about the effect of their hard wiring into technological devices has enabled some take the opportunity to go hard turkey or to assess how much time they are wasting by their constant interruptions.

Asking individual's to run a tally sheet for the times and frequency over a week they were on the phone, twitter, facebook and other technological interrupters such as email forces students to take stock of what they are doing and when they are doing. It actually surprises some students how long they are on facebook each day and what they could of achieved in that time frame.

Action plan

• Continue to control the hard wiring and make sure there are times each day when I am off the grid
• Continue to lay the ground rules re communication and my mobile phone.
• Get students to review their technological usage and adopt strategies to enable them more control over their interactions.