July 14, 2017, by Jessica Watson
Hello from the Teacher Training (UTT) team
The next major go-live for Project Transform in the UK, is the launch of Campus Solutions for Teacher Training (UTT) applications. Below, the UTT team give us some insight into how’re they feeling about the new system and how the go-live will affect their job.
Hello from the tiny UTT team…
Don’t know about any of the other folks facing the go-live of the new systems but we can’t wait!
We are a very small team within Admissions who work on Initial Teacher Training applications for the School of Education.
What we do now
We’ve had a pretty tumultuous year as we’ve faced a huge amount of change to processes and staffing. All the while, we’re still having to maintain a high level of service. We need to ensure we don’t contravene any National College of Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) guidelines or put our Outstanding Ofsted report in jeopardy!
We currently run the applications through a legacy system. Although we have both been working with it for years, it has some… how shall we say it?… idiosyncrasies.
Every application we receive for the Teacher Training programmes has to be largely inputted manually. There is what the system likes to call a “Download” process that usually just pulls through the applicant’s name and date of birth, maybe a degree classification, but certainly not a subject or degree title – that would be too logical.
It means that at busy times it is incredibly labour intensive and takes a fair amount of training to get used to how to do it.
We enter offers directly into UCAS-TT. It is always a touch worrisome as there’s no catch if you do make a mistake! Any applicant movement (accepts/declines/withdrawals) are only discovered by checking Weblink individually and obsessively. We can still name people who we made offers to last year and the year before, that I had to check manually every day for what felt like months on end… only to have them decline.
So any improvement on what we are currently working with is a move in the right direction!
Working with Campus Solutions
We are both Decision Makers within the Admissions office and have a fair amount of experience working with Campus due to our other undergraduate responsibilities.
From what we have seen in Campus UG, we are all going to be much happier with the new system. There is less manual entry of qualifications, less individual qualification details chasing and – our favourite – it will tell us if an applicant has withdrawn their application in UCAS before we chase them for details!!!!
Admissions blog series
This is the first in a series of blogs from colleagues working with Admissions. They’ll be blogging about how the preparation for go-live is going in Admissions. You’ll be able to hear their thoughts on training and what the system is looking like.
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