School Admin News

Sometimes it is difficult to think of different ways in which a school office can be organised. It has a space, it has staff, and it is the place which sees more variety in terms of activity than any other room in the school. You have it organised, and it does its job.

And yet some administrators have found that by modifying what goes on in the school office it is possible to make the whole operation of the school much more efficient and more effective. Even more exciting, such changes can actually save money rather than cost money.

The only problem is that for most of us it is very hard to see the changes that might be possible when we are working within the arena that we wish to change.

This is not the fault of anyone within the school. In fact this type of problem occurs in all organisations, from hospitals to businesses, from charities to sports clubs – we are all so busy doing the day by day work we find it hard to see how to change the way we do it.

Seven years ago the School of Educational Administration was awarded a grant by government to look at this issue and to set up a course for those who work in school administration which would help them find new ways of working. Together with the University of Northampton we developed the first nation-wide courses to do just this: the one-year Certificate in Educational Administration and the one-term Work Management and Administration course.

Both are distance-learning courses based around the work of the school office. Administrators who take these courses become able to see how changes in the way in which their work is structured can make a huge difference to their effectiveness and efficiency. They also become more able to take on other tasks, which allows them to more work and focus more effectively.

I do hope you will be interested in taking this course. The closing date for the next Certificate in Education course is 19 June, while the closing date for the Work Management and Administration course is 5 June.

To see the prospectus click here

To request a printed prospectus click here, or phone 01536 399 007

For more information please see www.admin.org.uk

About 55% of schools are now willing to give out the personal email address of heads of dept at school (as in gsmith@myschool.sch.gov.uk) to the SEA when we ask.   Having emails go directly to a teacher obviously reduces the level of email coming into the school office.

When I have asked administrators in the schools that won’t give out the individual email addresses the reply is normally “it just means teachers will get loads of emails they don’t want”.

Having a conversation just now with a bursar in a school it has struck me that perhaps some schools are not using the “message rules” system to handle such emails.

Schools that use this system set up “message rules” on each of the individual email addresses and the main school address so that any message that has a particular phrase in it, goes straight into a delete box.   So, for example, (and I am going to mis-spell or split these examples just in case your system already has this) any email that arrives with the word “hang .over” goes straight into that box.   Another word that triggers this on my system is “pat ches” (you’ll see what I mean).

Because my email address, and indeed articles by myself, turn up on lots of websites I get around 300 or so rubbish emails a day, but the system of deflection means that only about 10 or so get through a day.

It is a little time consuming to set up a message rule system at first (I reckon it might take half an hour), but the saving in day to day time thereafter is huge.  If I ever spot another group of emails arriving that I have not caught before, I set up a new message rule which takes me maybe 1 minute.  And such a system allows the school office to be freed of sorting emails for individual teachers – which can knock 15 to 45 minutes off the work load a day.  Maybe more.

“Message rules” is the name that is given to the system on Outlook Express (click Tools, then Message Rules and the Mail), but all systems have this facility in there somewhere.

If you are in a school that is insisting that all email comes in through the school office, it might be worth going to whoever has made this decision and discussing it.  You are having to spend ages sorting through mail which could go elsewhere – without causing any problems – and the majority of schools are now following this system.  Obviously it is a matter for each school – but there is a solution.

Tony Attwood
Director, School of Educational Administration

About 55% of schools are now willing to give out the personal email address of heads of dept at school (as in gsmith@myschool.sch.gov.uk) to the SEA when we ask.   Having emails go directly to a teacher obviously reduces the level of email coming into the school office.

Hamilton House Mailings plc reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

Over the years some schools have viewed continuous professional development programmes as the exclusive province of teaching and management staff. 

However, I believe that the changes that are being introduced to school administration within the next couple of years mean that it is more important than ever that administrators should receive continuous professional development as well.

One of the most interesting developments in the next 18 months will be the advent of real time reporting, first in secondary schools in England, and then soon after that in primary schools and throughout the rest of the UK. Through this process, schools will be required to ensure that parents have constant access to updated information about their children, on-line, all the time.

Of course, the ICT team in the school will be arranging for the technical details to be covered, but this development will have huge implications for all administrators who of course represent the key link between the parent and the school.

This compulsory changeover to electronic communication with parents will potentially affect many aspects of administrative work, which is why it is important that you are involved in discussions relating to this and all the other changes that are now happening.

The Certificate in Educational Administration has been devised to help in this regard. The course doesn’t aim to teach how the changes themselves should be handled, but instead gives all the information that is relevant to implementing change and to considering all the knock on effects that can result from such change.

The Certificate course is a QCA-validated, one year, distance-learning course which gives an overview of the way in which change and development happen in schools, and which enables administrators to become involved at an early, rather than later stage.

The next starting date for the course is 11^th May, and the closing date for applications for that intake is 1^st May.

The course is at the same standard as an A-level, and involves practical activities, discussions on-line with administrators from other schools, access to a range of articles about schools and administration, and the undertaking of a year long project.

I do hope you will consider joining the hundreds of your colleagues across the UK who have already taken the course since it was launched with government funding four years ago.

• To see the prospectus click here

• To request a printed prospectus click here, or phone 01536 399 007

• For more information click here

Throughout the year questions are put to us by school administrators and we then ask everyone who subscribes to our free email news service if they can provide answers.   Here’s the latest set of Q and A.  If you would like to join the news service it is free, and simple.   You will receive one or two emails a week, and if at any time you want to leave, you just send us an email saying “Unsubscribe”.

To join send an email with the word SUBSCRIBE in the subject line to ed.admin@schools.co.uk

Here’s the Q and A.

A huge thank you to all of you who replied to the latest batch of administrator questions. It made for very interesting reading.

I have put a summary of your responses below.

Your replies to the first question about email communication with parents demonstrated some very mixed experiences – so I have put a selelction of your replies on the internet so that you can all have a look at them if you so wish.

Please feel free to continue to email us with questions that you may have in respect of your work – but can I remind you to first check that your question has not already been put to the group. See the Administrators Questions section of our website.

1. Parentmail/electronic communication

There were very mixed responses here, some administrators reporting that it worked really well and made a huge difference to the office workload while others said that it was such a nightmare getting and maintaining the data that they had to abandon it.

What was clear was that if a school can gather sufficient email addresses or mobile phone numbers and can implement a system for keeping this up-to-date there is a huge benefit to be had in terms of reducing photocopying and better communication with parents. Only a few of you reported that parents were resistant to email/text communication and many that they were supportive. But clearly for the system to work it is up to the school to be proactive in keeping records up-to-date by constantly asking for updates at every opportunity.

A full list of your replies can be read here – the personal experiences of how to get and maintain data is very helpful.

2. Water bottles – who cleans them

Again you reported mixed experiences on the topic of cleaning water bottles. The majority of schools seem to make it the responsibility of the parents to keep them clean and sent the bottles home either every evening or once a week. A few of you reported that your school had designated teaching assistants whose job it is to keep water bottles clean; while a couple of schools had tried water bottles, found them unhygienic and had moved over to a water jug and disposable cup system.

I had a quick rummage round the internet to see if I could find any official guidance on this. I found a very useful 2008 report from the Health Education Trust on water cooler guidance – section 5.2 gives guidance on keeping bottles clean and advises that “it is preferable for children and parents take responsibility for cleaning the bottles daily at home”.

3. Examinations officer role – moving to school office?

Under workforce remodelling the examinations officer role can no longer be carried out by a teacher. This is now a job carried out by a non-teaching member of staff and is in many cases a full time job though sometimes combined with other responsibilities in the school. Only a few of you reported that the task had been moved to the school office – but in those cases the administrator had been trained and re-graded.

4. A software package to measure the distances precisely

Most of you reported that you found the local authority distance measuring tool adequate for your purposes.

Alternatives which you mentioned are:

• Smart

• RAC route planner

5. Blackboard re-blacking

Apparently you can buy blackboard paint at DIY stores – cheap and easy

6. Risk assessments re keeping chickens

We did not get many responses to this question though a few of you were interested in the reply as you are thinking of getting some chickens for your school.

One school reported buying chickens via Omlet and the company provided a risk assessment form. The school reported a very positive experience with keeping the chickens.

7. Converting documents to pdf

Many of you do this already – mostly using the free pdf convertor available with Word 2007. Other free pdf convertors are available from:

• Cute

• DoPDF

• Primopdf

Over the years a number of schools have restricted continuous professional development programmes to teaching and management staff.  However the changes that are now happening within schools – and those that will continue to happen in the next 18 months – mean that it is more important than ever that administrators should receive continuous professional development as well.

One of the most interesting developments in the next 18 months will be the advent of real time reporting, first in secondary schools and then soon after that in primary schools.

Of course the ICT team in the school will be arranging for the technical details to be covered, but this development will have huge implications for the administrative staff who until now have been the key interface between the parent and the school.  If they do not have background training on the way in which changes within and beyond their realm can be implemented, it is likely that the school will struggle.

With this in mind I would commend the QCA validated, one year distance learning course THE CERTIFICATE IN EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION.  This course does not work in detail on the latest developments – but it does something more important.  It gives an overview of the way in which change and development happens in schools, and it enables administrators to consider their view in relation to the rest of the school.

The next course starts on 11May, and the closing date for applications 1 May.

The course is at the same standard as an A level, and involves practical activities, discussions on line with administrators from other schools, reading through and commenting on a number of articles about schools and administration, and the undertaking of a year long project.

• To see the prospectus click here
• To request a printed prospectus click here, or phone 01536 399 007
• For more information click here

Tony Attwood

The School of Education Administration has recently been researching how schools handle incoming and outgoing messages.  This seems an incredibly important issue at the moment given the huge changes that will arise next year with the government’s real time reporting directive coming into force for English secondary schools.  Primary schools will follow, and I believe the rest of the UK will also be making this move.

In essence the current situation is that 80% of schools send out messages to parents as paper messages.  The reasons for not converting to email are primarily that parents say they don’t like it, and not all parents have email.

However the benefits in terms of the environment and cost to the school are overwhelming, and once real time reporting comes in (in which all data about pupils must be available on the internet) it will look increasingly odd to use paper.

Although most schools are not moving on this issue, some are, and here is part of an email I received from a headteacher in Northants recently.

Re e-mails  we put  newsletters on our website and parents, governors and members of the community are invited to join our list so they can receive  a prompt when a new letter is posted – we have this free facility through Aardvack. This encourages parents not only to look at the newsletter but also see the website as it is updated fairly frequently. We ask parents to let us know if they cannot access the internet and we send a hard copy to those parents – out of 300 children we send 30 hard copies. This has significantly reduced the time taken to send letters – a good job really as our admin now have to do so many other ‘official’ reports to LA/DCSF that they would n’t have time unless we removed some of their original tasks!!

Incoming messages are equally a point of discussion, and I’ll deal with these in the next news letter.

• Each month many administrators send in questions to the Administrators News Service, and we endeavour to answer these questions.  Below is a list of current questions.  If you would like to see the answers, or ask a question yourself, you can do this by joining the Admin News Group.  It is a completely free service – just send an email to ed.admin@schools.co.uk  with the word SUBSCRIBE in the subject line.   Here are the questions…

1. Many people recommended Parentmail as a way of keeping in touch with parents. I wondered if any school has successfully managed to introduce such a system where they have a core of parents who are VERY BAD at keeping their details up to date. I would guess that at any given time, 40% of our parents have changed their mobile numbers and have not told us! We have fewer than 10% of our parents who have given us email addresses. There seems to be a big push towards electronic communication with parents, so I would be interested in hearing how other schools coped

2. We are a very small school of 30 children and we were thinking of introducing water bottles in order that the children can have access to drinking water during the school day.  Can other schools who have introduced this system please advise me if the school takes responsibility for the sterilisation of the bottles or do the children take them home?

3. Currently our examinations’ officer is a member of the teaching staff, and does not feel that this is a teacher’s responsibility to organise and invigilate exams. The small office team has been informed that this may now be passed to them as one of their duties. Would like advice/experience to share on this subject before I meet senior management.

4. We are looking for a software package which can measure the shortest distance from an address to the edge of our school catchment area.  This needs to be very precise so it can differentiate even between house numbers on the same street rather than just working on postcodes and measure the distance to the closest edge of our catchment.

5. We have a blackboard that the teacher needs re-blacking? Can anyone recommend a company that does it?

6. Does any school keep their own chickens on the school premises?  Does anyone have any policies/checklists/risk assessments that have been used to set this up? 

7. We are in the process of obtaining all our parents’ email addresses and eventually we hope to become paperless by sending all letters, documents, newsletter etc to parents by email.  In order to do this we would need to protect our documents in Acrobat/Adobe format.  Has anybody investigated this already and is there a special educational price available?

By law, all schools have to undergo an annual PAT test – which involves having every electrical appliance in the school tested for its safety.   Every item of equipment that passes has a portable appliance electrical safety test certificate fixed to it (you should find one of the back of your computer screen if it is over one year old, for example). 

The issue has been raised with us that this can be a very disruptive and difficult process if it is handled in the school day when there are children around. 

I’m wondering how schools cover this problem.  For example, is testing done in the school holidays, after school hours, over the weekend – or is it done during the school day with the testers being CRB vetted? 

If you have a moment could you drop me a line to let me know how your school handles this  If you could also tell me the size of your school in terms of number of pupils, that would help too.  

I’ll publish results with any thoughts and novel solutions, in a week or two.

Many thanks

Please reply to Tony @ schools.co.uk