Let’s hear it for the Clearing teams

18 Aug 2015

Last week, some of our colleagues had the busiest days of their working year, following the release of the 2015 A-level results

As the tide of A level results broke last Thursday morning, the phones in the University's Clearing call centre began ringing at 8am and didn’t stop until 6pm, when the teams finished their first exhausting day. By the end of the day, the call centre had received 5,200 calls - a massive increase of 72% over the previous year.

The 29 members of staff who had volunteered to operate the call centre were the first point of enquiry for prospective applicants, their parents and teachers, who wanted to know everything from “But I dropped a grade – is the University really still going to accept me?” to “I’ve got better grades than I thought – can I ‘trade up’ from my original firm choice to come and study at Manchester?”

The teams continued to answer calls on Friday (8am-5pm), followed by a three-hour stint on Saturday and two hours on Sunday. By Monday, they had answered more than 7,500 calls.

The call centre was supplemented by the Clearing website, which went live on Wednesday, 12 August at 6pm. By the end of Thursday, it had attracted 144,000 hits - 53,000 of them from individual IP addresses. Most were from the UK, followed closely by Malaysia, the USA, China and Hong Kong. By the end of the Clearing period, total hits had risen to 190,000.

For Faculty recruitment and admissions teams across the University, work had begun even earlier, when the exam results were released to universities the previous weekend. In the Faculty of Humanities, admissions teams worked throughout Sunday to make decisions about ‘near misses’ and process decisions and they were also hard at work from 8am on Thursday, dealing with the enquiries that flooded in when the Clearing hotline opened.

Felicity Wicks, Faculty Marketing Manager (Student Recruitment), said: “The days when universities lowered their offers to get students through the doors at Clearing are long gone.

“Since the Chancellor’s announcement of the abolition of the student number cap from 2015 – meaning that universities can recruit an unlimited number of students – Clearing has changed and even selective institutions now regularly accept applicants through Clearing, keeping their doors open for high-quality applicants who may have performed better than they thought, or who change their minds about their original course of study.

“In the Faculty of Humanities, this is the case on a number of courses, and we shall be delighted to welcome these additional students in September. But it’s only made possible by the tremendous efforts of our admissions and recruitment staff during the Clearing period.”

Student Communications and Marketing Manager (Pre-Reg) Jayne Golden, who co-ordinated the Clearing call centre, said: “All these members of staff volunteer for this role, taking time out of their regular schedules to come together for this busy period.

“Many of them don’t have a student admissions background. After receiving training to equip them for the role, they are plunged into a period of frenetic activity and they do a fantastic job.”