Gateshead College: Enrolment Shambles 2009
I went to Gateshead College last week to sign up for AS Level English on the afternoon of Monday 7th September. Quite a simple procedure, one would think. I had telephoned the previous Friday to check that there were spaces available on the course, and that I should turn up between 4pm and 6pm to register.
So I turned up and found there was a queue next to the registration desk. When I approached this, I was told that this wasn’t the queue for me: this queue was only for the people who were ready to register. I had thought that I was, but apparently not: in order to be allowed to take AS Level English, I needed to have an interview.
And that meant that I had to stand in a second queue downstairs near the entrance, where I was given a form to fill in, indicating which course I wanted to do. I noted down AS Level English, along with a few details about myself (such as previous qualifications, including English and Maths GCSE) and when I reached the front of the queue, I showed this to the staff manning this little desk. Here I was directed to the second floor.
On the second floor I discovered two things: firstly, that there was already a big queue (queue no. three), and that there was a water dispenser so I could get a drink of water. Unfortunately, as people seemed to have been queuing for quite some time already (despite me having been told registration was only going to open at 4pm) most of the little plastic cups had already gone, but I still managed to get one of the last three.
After waiting in this queue for a further twenty minutes or so, I made it to the front of this queue, where a gentleman glanced at my form, circled ‘literacy test’ on it and asked me to wait until my name was read out, whereupon I would go and take a literacy test. And, while I was no longer stood in a queue per se, it was still another opportunity to wait — for over twenty minutes — before my name was finally called out and I had to go and stand in another queue.
This queue was outside a classroom where I had to wait until there was a space in the classroom for me to take the test. The one member of staff inside the classroom seemed to be struggling: people were asking for assistance more quickly than she could deal with them, and there was frequently someone waiting for more than five minutes for her to get to them, which wasn’t exactly helping the queue go down quickly.
I quickly found out what was taking so long. The supervisor was showing someone to a seat, and then asking them to click on the appropriate test (numeracy or literacy) and then wandering off to deal with someone else. Unfortunately, this then left you with no indication of how to fill in the basic details screen without which you were not able to proceed.
For example, you had to input a student ID number which no-one had provided, but you then had to indicate what your ‘key skills’ were. Without any information about precisely what they were after, I found it difficult to determine whether my key skills were “none”, “pending” or “1″, “2″, “3″ or “4″. After waiting the obligatory five minutes for the supervisor to come over, she explained that I should put in a student ID of “00000″ and “none” for key skills and to begin the test.
Given that she was having to do this for pretty much every candidate, I was rather struck by the complete lack of organisation. If everyone in a given classroom is taking a test where they have to answer the same sort of basic information, and there’s no additional information about it available on the computer screen (the program dated back to 2003, and goodness me, dated was the right word), and you’ve got students coming in at different times to take the test then I would have presumed anyone with an ounce of sense would have written the information on the board as opposed to needing to relate it to each student individually.
But no, Gateshead College didn’t do it that way.
So anyway, I sat the literacy test and was a bit narked by it. Yes, I understand that for some courses — people wishing to take English GCSE or improve basic literacy — may find this test appropriate, but it was plainly not appropriate for someone wanting to do an English AS level. I have already reached the stage where my grasp of English is sufficiently good to determine that “hlep” is not the correct way of spelling “help”, and asking repeated questions at the same level — 72 in all — does not make the test any more appropriate.
Anyway, it then appeared that I had managed to achieve the required level of basic literacy, getting 72/72 correct in under 7 minutes (you being allowed 30 minutes to take the test) and continued to follow the instructions on screen which asked me to print out the results, asking the supervisor if you didn’t know which printer. So I set it off to print, and when the choice of printers came up I called the supervisor over who said “oh, no! don’t print it! I just write the results down.”
I smiled politely but at this point I was thinking that if you ask people to follow the instructions on a test but then want people to deviate from the instructions at a particular point, it might possibly be helpful if you tell them beforehand. Again, “writing it on the board” might have helped.
So it appeared that I had achieved basic literacy, but I was already beginning to think that Gateshead College was well on their way to failing “being able to organise a piss-up in a brewery”. And this feeling was only to get stronger.
I took my literacy results back along the corridor where I was advised that I would need to wait again, this time for an interview. So I waited. And waited. After about forty minutes more of waiting — by now I had been at the college for two hours and hadn’t been allowed to get anywhere near signing up for anything, instead having to complete mindless box-ticking exercises — I overheard someone being directed over on the basis that they were in the wrong place: the second floor was only for HEFCs, not for A-levels.
I quickly butted in at this point and said that I was here for A-levels: look, that’s what it said on my sheet. The sheet that I had filled in downstairs and shown to the staff who had then directed me up to the second floor. The sheet that I had then shown to the person on the second floor who had told me to wait for my literacy test: the sheet that the supervisor in the literacy test had filled in my test scores on.
None of whom were able (or possibly willing) to put in the required level of effort to actually read my form properly and register that I was in the wrong place for A-levels.
At this point, I started to take a little more notice of other people who I could overhear describing the enrolment process as “a complete waste of time”, “farcical” and the entirely apposite “complete. fucking. shambles.” People were also commented that there was nothing unusual about finding this at Gateshead College, although they were commenting that it was “even worse than usual” this year.
I wanted to be sure that it wasn’t just me, and so I asked people on Facebook and Twitter whether any had encountered any similar experiences, and this pretty much summed up the response:
it it is the same old problem. Lots of demand from new and old students but only 3 staff on duty. Q[ueue] out the door. The lower cafe not open (mid day) and the other reception desk totally uninterested in helping or even confirming if we were even in the right Q[ueue].‘Chris’
For me, the fact that it is seen as the same old problem shows that while the demand may be higher than expected, the bigger problem is that the people responsible for organising enrolment have not learned lessons from the past. I certainly didn’t think it is unreasonable to suggest that their level of competency for arranging this sort of thing ought to be called into question.
Anyway, I then ended up being directed downstairs, where — with the person whom I had overheard being directed — I waited to speak to someone about A-levels. After waiting for a little while, I actually got to talk to someone about the A-levels, and discovered that a decision had been made not to run AS and A level English.
Not only had I wasted my time in queues I had no reason to stand in, not only had I been directed to attend a literacy test, not only had I wasted over two hours because no-one had bothered to actually read my form before directing me anywhere, but I needn’t have bothered to attend Gateshead College in the first place because they weren’t actually putting on the courses they were advertising in the prospectus.
Now I did point out that I wasn’t best pleased by this — particularly since I’d phoned up on Friday and I was still advised to turn up — and I was advised that someone would phone me back the following morning to see whether they might still, in the end, run the A or AS level course. Frankly, I don’t mind queueing for a course that is cancelled owing to lack of interest — that’s not their fault — but when I’ve given up time, and spent money on bus journeys because Gateshead College weren’t sufficiently competent to decide what courses they were offering prior to enrolment, then I feel cheated.
And I’m not the only one, judging by the responses I heard of people coming out. If they are so badly organised in terms of enrolment, then no amount of nice shiny new campus is going to instil me with confidence that they will get anything else right either. And if they are going to be allowed to waste other people’s time like that in future then I think people ought to know about it — or that they ought to feel obliged to compensate people for wasting their time and money.
Where was I? Oh yes, they were going to phone me back the next morning. Only of course no-one actually did.
So I got in contact with them over email. I’ll come to the issues I have with their website another time, but let’s just say that I eventually managed to navigate their contact form and left them a message detailing the issues I had had with them, where I asked a number of questions:
If the college was not expecting to run the English Language AS level course, then why did no-one at reception, or at any time during my queueing inform me about this? Why does the college offer courses on its prospectus that it will not go on to run, and make people waste their time by not only having the inconvenience of turning up when the course wasn’t on, but being sent to waste their time in further pointless queues?
I then left my phone number with this person who assured me that someone would be in contact on tuesday morning to advise further. As it is now 14:35 on tuesday afternoon, and I have heard nothing more, what was the point of this? Was it just to get me out of the building?
I would like to know:
- How many of Gateshead College’s advertised courses are not to be run
- What steps will be taken in future to ensure that this shambolic enrolment procedure is improved in future.
- Can you describe the procedures (if any) which you put in place this year to ensure that enrolment went smoothly?
- Why I was told to come down to sign up to a course that was not being run?
- Why was I (and others) then sent to the wrong place?
- When Gateshead College make a commitment to contact someone, why do they they renege on that commitment?
My message to Gateshead College
I judged from this that they might have managed to ascertain that I was somewhat miffed, and I would like to think that this would have encouraged them to get back to me, but if that wasn’t enough, I also added a further note:
Please note that I have retained a copy of this information, and this, along with any further information from yourselves (or your lack of responnse as appropriate) will be used for publication next week, as will any further information/stories I discover relating to other dissatisfied potential students.My message to Gateshead College
And tomorrow I’ll look at their response…
Jonathon says:
September 18th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
You get lucky i had to wait 3 hours just to be told that no one would be interviewing the night.
Joanne says:
October 6th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
I signed up for a course at Gateshead College on the same day.
I had applied for the course over the internet.
I also had to stand in three different queues(during which, the fire alarm went off so we had to leave the building and I lost my place)before I my application was processed. I was told over the telephone that the registration would only take about 20 minutes, so I went along in my lunch hoursss – I was there for three hours!
I was also given the wrong date to start my course, so inevitably I missed my first lecture!
James says:
August 26th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Just finished my English AS at Gateshead, I got an A, it was a dead good course, you should have joined
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