Seconded | AUA Quick reads

Helen Matthews | Head of Academic Policy and Quality Assurance | UCL

I am the business lead for a significant part of a major project to transform UCL’s student system. When my boss first suggested that for the next phase of our project, what we really needed was to second a group of administrators from academic departments across the institution for one day a week each, my first thought was ‘how on earth are we going to make that work?’ Somehow we did, and I’m excited to share with AUA colleagues our experiences of what happened next.

Robbie was one of our first group of secondees and a great advocate for the project. He will be giving his own perspective on the experience:

‘Why do you want to bring your story to the conference, sir?’ The short answer, for those with overly busy lives, is due my inability to say no to any invitation involving anything less complex than building a nuclear power station by hand. The long answer is that the things that have been done and are being done within the Academic Model Project and the interesting nature of a partial secondment may be things worth hearing by those who may find themselves in a similar position, or are in the throes of thinking about secondment or indeed planning a revamp of their own institution’s central systems (hopefully, with said institution’s awareness and blessings). The part of my session which I am most passionate about would have to be the Exam Board Reports-revolution and you should come along to that in order to witness first-hand whether I can truly animate such a topic in order that you too may be enthused.

210: Seconded is a working session at the AUA Annual Conference and Exhibition 2020. In these mini blogs, our session speakers talk about the journey that lead to this point. You can view the whole conference programme here.