Clearing Cleared!

Clearing 2016 was a high profile project brought about by the decision to accept limited numbers of Rest of UK applicants in UCAS Clearing. It was high profile because Edinburgh has never done this before and if it wasn't handled correctly it could impact the University's profile. Activity commenced on 18 August when A-level results were published.

The UCAS Clearing process required applicants to contact the University by telephone before applying for a place. We therefore needed to set up a call centre and all associated telephony for handling inbound calls. It was also necessary to recruit and train a team of call centre agents to handle the inbound enquiries and all of the associated processes/documentation to make this possible.

A hard deadline was set to complete the project, which meant that the job had to be done by the above date. Also, final notification of the requirements came close to the clearing date which meant less time to build the necessary processes and technology. This was very challenging, but it went live on the day it was supposed to and there were no major issues. The call centre operated until 10:30 on Friday 19 August and 110 clearing places were filled. Technology behaved exactly as was expected, call centre agents worked very well and the processes that were devised were well thought out and thorough.

All the departments involved had quite different ways of getting things done, but were brought together and worked as a team. They worked very hard, a lot of flexibility was demonstrated and all of those involved avoided being overly dogmatic about how things were handled. Ultimately this paid off in not only in a successful project, but also in building relationships across the University.

Taking all of this into consideration it is fair to say the initiative was a complete success.