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.

Continuing Fall out - November 2009

Again this month we have continued to deal with constant disruption in our business. It seems that once a period of disruption occurs it rolls from one event to the next. At this stage we are in the hang on and lets try to ride this out phase. When we have students in a similar situation it can be excessively frustrating for them as they feel they cannot get a break and they are never getting their heads above water. I can total sympathise with this feeling of being overwhelmed.

One way we have been dealing this has been to set realistic goals and develop tasks list that enable us to see that we have achieved something within a set time. This sense of achievement is helping with the management of the stress levels we are experiencing.

Also I think our additional contingency planning has helped as well.his is where a couple of months ago I suggested that we have a decent and regular rainy day fund and a couple of our collective group laughed at the amount I was suggesting. It was startling to get a request from one of the cynics this month that when we get an opportunity as in when we get paid can we stash the amount you were suggesting when we get all the back bills paid. Knock me down with a bunch of feathers.

For our students I would suggest that they try and not live to the max on their student loans and bursaries but put a little amount away for their rainy day fund.We have to consider the big issues of what happens if you need transport to placement when your car breaks down. Can you handle the additional costs of trying to get into placement?

When the ride is getting rocky you can only do what you can only do and sometimes we need to be reminded that we are human rather than taking on superhuman tasks.

Trouble runs in threes - October 2009

It seems that trouble runs in threes. Back in July I got that dreaded Swine Flu lergy but the rest of the team were forced in isolation.

R&R were struck down, one week after each other at the end of September. R1 then returned back into the workplace far too early in my own opinion as she was still not fully recovered from the dreaded Oink oink. A result of her early return R1 was then knocked off her perch by a nasty super virus that the students have thoughtfully shared with her. Then being the lovely person she is, R1, shared the virus with me. The outcome of this situation was that I ended up with most of the month off with pleurisy and then bronchial pneumonia. There are two weeks there where I have no memory other than feeling absolutely rotten with a cough and playing Darth Vader. I think the doctor was tempted to send me to hospital but I would not go thanks to all the other illnesses that were running round the region at the time.

I think in away this situation was another reminder that although we have been talking about changing the cooperative teams work life balance initiatives we have been repeatedly sucked back into our old ways of working. We still have not resolved the administrative issues and we are only likely to resolve that when we get a better funding stream. We cannot get a better funding stream until the local Authorities actually start paying their bills which means we have to do some debt collection. The problem is we are in a Catch 22 situation we are going out to do the work but we all do not having the time to chase the bills.

Teaching wise this semester we have a number of dissertation students who we have been counselling to be proactive and work on developing the time and project management skills. For some students we provide the guidance but it returns to the classic situation we can lead a horse to water but you cannot force it to drink.

Action plan

• Finish the implementation of a DMS
• Get the billing requests uptodate
• To stay on top of the workload
• Review the work/life balance load of all staff members
• Schedule specific sessions for organisational tasks.

Preparing for a New Academic year - September 2009

It is preparation time again. This means yet again we are reviewing and attempting to complete as much of the teaching preparation done as early as possible. This initial preparation at the start of the semester is important as it helps in the management and organisation of teaching sessions. Students need to be reminded that they should be organised and they need to prepare before the start of the academic teaching sessions.

Initial organisation for us includes the development of teaching schedules. For students it is about working out what sessions they have on at specific times and what timetabling choices are the most appropriate for their needs. I remind students about work life balance and I feel that we need to remind ourselves about work / life balance as support workers it just as important for us to ensure that we are not over tired and able to focus on the sessional needs of our students.

Half the battle for us as support workers this months is the juggling the stage return of the various institutions we are working in due to the different teaching start dates. R&R have been back since the first week, I returned on the second week of the month and J was lucky last in the last week of the month. The different dates has not meant that we were madly rushing about but it was a looming overbearing feeling of impending doom.

The feelings of doom due to the organisational conflicts of the student have been compounded with the concerns we have had of the Student finance situation and what are the likely aspects to this has on our future outcomes. The financial situation and the current political discussion, clearly indicates that there is high chance in May next year we will have a new political party incharge of government policy. The real question is where will we be in 12 months or 18 months.

Action Plan

• development of centre schedule which contains all the teams schedule using the new dms.
• watch the current political discussions
• maintain current knowledge of the economy through the reading of the Financial times
• Remind students about work life balance and the development of effective schedules.

Strategic Review - August 2009

The July - Swine Flue saga we were had some success with the diversification activities and this additional funding helped the bottom line of our bank statements. After the confinement of July the additional funding stream took off in August that was marvelous for us. The new demand has created additional areas for further development and following up and thus our organisational task list has increased considerably. After last months experience what can you do but start at the top and work your way down.

As a team we had a lovely strategic away visit to Shropshire in the first week of August and it was a chance to review what we as an organisation entity want to achieve. Danesfort Consulting is our collective management organisation for the team members skills while enabling individuals personal professional development opportunities through access projects which the team are interested in which their normal institutional organisation does not support. The primary focus of the organisation is the provision of support services to students in higher education to enable them to reach their full potential in the university environment.

The additional funding stream is something from a completely different sector and is aimed at developing the collective’s individuals’ creative so that financial benefit can be developed from winding down activities and funding to support future activities.

Action Plan

• To improve the organisational practices
• Streamline administration tasks
• Ensure that regular billing occurs
• Develop the new income streams
• Undertake further research for continuing professional development programs.

Swine Flu outbreak - July 2009

The month of July for us is the time when we celebrate the success of our students by attending their various graduation ceremonies. As usual I attended as either an usher or part of the academic parade so that I could see the students whom I have supported graduations without taking a seat that could be allocated to a family member. Thanks to my attendance at one institutional graduation ceremony I contracted Swine Flu and as a result the rest of the Danesfort team had to be quarantined.

The July financial statments were also hit by the new organisational set up of Student Finance Company being the primary SpLD account manager. Already we are starting to hear how this changing in operations is creating complications and there have been processing difficulties for new students applying to university. It does not look like we will transition well in the Support sector as if they cannot get the bog standard students right how are they going to deal with complex needs. I have a feeling that old standby of paying the support agencies last will be occurring yet again. We took a hit with the Swine Flu the new academic year and the continued fall out of difficult economic conditions in the economy has every warning flag to say again we are going to have difficulties. The Swine Flu episode reinforced how a minor incident can created major hiccups that can lead to disastrous impacts. One of the key lessons from the Swine Flu has been that no matter what contingency planning you do there are problems that you do not even consider.

From this force confinement of isolation the work life balance of certain individuals has again raised itself as organisational issue that needs to be addressed. While as an organisation we conform to the Work Health and Safety regulation it appears that some individuals are putting in extra hours on their computers that are above and beyond the call of duty and what I would describe as reasonable. When speaking to staff members they all provide a similar rationale that if they don’t do it they will not be prepared for their appointment sessions and there is no one else who can do what they are doing.

Growth and managing growth in this type of organisation is difficult. We have undertaken some diversification to further the funding stream but we are still not at the point where the additional administrative support can be funded. We have hit that crisis point where we have so much work on but not enough bodies to do it but still not enough regular funding to support a part time administrator. With the current uproar about Student Finance England along with the great levels of uncertainty in the UK economy as an organisation we have decided to delay the employment of an administrator until the financial situation seems to be more stable. It always seems that in periods of change and transitions between systems that support workers and educational consultants have rely on alternative forms of funding to ensure that they receive some form of income stream. The diversification into another market sector is planned to provide funding and activity during the summer months as this is normally the university support workers lean period of the year.

Reflective Practice - June 2009

At the end of another academic year I thought it was time utilise a new technology to develop my reflective practice. Through the use of a blog I plan to ensure regular reflective practice is occurring and thus hopefully improve my professional practice and my operational activities. The use of technology was to ensure that I become more familiar with the latest application developments.

Each year I take time to review and reflect on the previous academic year. I think this is necessary as so often we are caught up in the daily activities of trying to manage our workloads, student demands and family commitments. After a very busy year I believe that is now is the time to refocus on my professional work /life balance and review my own personal professional development needs.

When working with my diverse range of students I am constantly reminded about the difficulties that many including myself in managing family, work commitments, daily live and then study demands on top of all our other responsibilities. Today was a day were I was reminded that organizational difficulties can occur with one individual and impact on many others.

The Danesfort organization had a minor crisis of personal scheduling for one person, which impacted on the rest of the team. As an organizational group we have previously flagged that we had to address the scheduling but due to the time constraints of the academic year and students needs we had being doing the work in an adhoc manner. J has been working on a new electronic data management system but but now the priority on it will need to increase. J has been working on a new database management system but has been distracted by other work commitments. During this summer I plan to develop our operational activities and make the new database is a priority one item. We cannot keep on as we are as trying to cover the load is causing stressors for the whole team.

The panic stations situation this morning in the office brought it really home how organisational problems could be avoided through the use of effective systems and as the MD I need to address the issue. The administrative problems if not checked could create issues for our students and the main reason why we are all in the support area is to provide quality teaching and support provision for out students.

Action plan for the future

• Raise the priority levels of the electronic scheduling system update


• Review the workloads of key staff members


• Look at improving stress management techniques for staff and students