Confirmation and Clearing 2009

So the dust is now begining to settle on another set of A level results and confirmation of new admissions to the University. The call centre approached seems to have worked very well in its new location as a result of all the planning and preparation works and in particular the co-location of all Academic School support staff in close proximity. I worked the clearing helpline on Thursday from 08:00 till about 15:00 and it was non-stop with calls coming in as early as two minutes past midnight. This year many more students seem to have used UCASTrack to seek confirmations online before going to collect their results. We took a record number of calls on the first day. The helpline continued over the weekend and for the two Open Days on Saturday and Sunday and although a little quieter by then was still taking new business. All the indications are that we will be managing the cap on numbers rather than pushing to meet intake targets for Home UG students. Some anecdotal things from my personal experience: nearly all students in clearing seem to have hotmail accounts (would like to check this), the information that students are supplying could be self-service (we could be smarter in processing the clearing enquiries), enquirers in general had excellent grades (is this the famous grade creep), some of us came across a web site call Unistats for the first time (this is well worth a look), it says some good things about our learning resources in the national student survey section (must investigate more). Oh, and Megan got her place confirmed at Sheffield using UCASTrack at about 07:30 and we are very proud of her results collected later in the day.