Since then, I have found differing services advising of snow-related disruption to be of somewhat variable quality, so I thought I’d look specifically at Bigger Lad’s school, my Local Authority, and Go North East, the local bus company, and tell you what precisely I’ve thought about their updates.

Success

So at seven a.m. on wednesday morning, I checked the school website to discover a message informing me that the school was closed owing to the fact that the staff couldn’t get in. By about eleven p.m. on wednesday evening, they had already updated the site to inform parents that the school would also be closed the following day.

Timely, useful updates. Well done.

Failure

Of course, my local council wasn’t quite so quick on the uptake… with their severe weather page stating (as at 09:10 on Wednesday morning — in other words some time after the time at which children would be required to be at school):

Are any schools closed due to the adverse weather?

No. At present, all schools are open as normal.

Local Authority

I was a little incredulous that this information had not been updated — the BBC had managed it easily enough, and after all, by half past eight, people will be setting off for school so if you are unable to update the information by then you are not capable of being a source for that information, so I mentioned it online. It was updated with school closures by 09:30, and there was also a tweet at around 09:40 but by then the information was too late to benefit anyone.

I was even more shocked when someone responded informally to tell me that they would be updating this information as soon as they got into work — but it might take them a little time to get in, because of the weather conditions.

WTF? Surely if your plan for extreme weather conditions is to tell the public about the extreme weather causing transport disruption and/or school closures only after your staff have made it into work then it is very seriously flawed. I’m sure you can all work out for yourselves the flaw in this.

They did manage to improve it considerably over the course of the day, putting in a list of all schools and their open status for Thursday and Friday (or at least, as far as they were aware) and for that reason I’ve refrained from publicly naming them.

The Snow Updates Medal: Success

However, I think that the most credit probably deserves to be pushed in the direction of the local bus company Go North East. Their website suggests that you head over to their Facebook page for the latest updates on bus services. The Facebook page was updated with thirty-four separate updates on Wednesday 6th.

And it’s not just been one way traffic either: Go North East actually have grasped how social media is supposed to work and have responded to people who have made comments:

As you can see, when Luke and Gareth have asked further questions, Go North East have not only responded to their enquiries (which many organisations seem to forget is part of the expectation of social media — it’s not a one-way communication broadcast, it’s a conversation) but they have responded to those enquires — made outside normal office hours — within fifteen minutes. Now that’s impressive. And so for me, the people responsible for Go North East’s social media streams deserve my award for the best snow-related updates.

Mind, that doesn’t help you a great deal if it turns out your route is one of the ones currently off!

Aside

It’s important to remember however that not necessarily everyone has internet access (although the vast majority do) and so the information about things such as school closures and travel disruption should be made as widely available as possible — lots of people will still expect to hear these things on local radio, whether or not Tony Horne likes it — although he does make a point (which I made last year) that if schools are able to text (or otherwise directly inform) parents, this is probably preferable.

The key thing is to make the information available to people through the channel they want, not the channel you want to feed them…

And now 2009 has come to a close, there’s a few things that I’d like to bring back to the public attention and ask, in a sort of a semi-polite but jabbing finger kind of a way, what the fuck is going on?

So here’s my shit-list for 2009…

• How come Trafigura and Carter-Ruck haven’t been more publicly hauled over the coals for attempting to silence debate about what is being discussed in parliament? If they’ve done nothing wrong, let them provide their side of the story.
• Does anyone know what — if any — disciplinary or criminal action has been taken against any of those police officers in the G20 who — to my untrained eyes at least — certainly appeared to have done something which I would have taken to be assault?
• Does anyone know what — if any — disciplinary action has been taken against those police officers who misled the media about the conditions under which Ian Tomlinson was first encountered, was treated, and so on?
• Does anyone know what — if any — action has been taken to prevent similar police tactics — that’s the kettling as well as the lying — being used in the future?
• Can anyone explain to me why no-one seems to be able to draw a line between MPs claiming perfectly reasonable expenses (“look at this cheeky fucker — wants to have a chair in his house, does he?”) and the slightly more outrageous ones (duck islands, moat cleaning, home-flipping). Can anyone explain to me why no MPs are yet facing criminal prosecution when Joe or Jane Muggins on a council estate who had lied for their benefits would already have seen the inside of a courtroom?
• Can anyone explain to me why the taxpayers should have bailed out the banks? I don’t recall the banks propping up the public sector when times were better for them. I don’t recall the banks telling taxpayers not to worry about their mortgages — they’d bail them out if needs be. So why should the taxpayer look after them? (Yes, I know we need a banking system: but I don’t see why it needs to be in private ownership)
• The fact that Tony Blair no longer seems to even care that the flimsy excuse for a war only his mate Dubya wanted hasn’t held up to even the faintest of scrutiny — and he’s still living the high life despite all the people that have died as a direct result of his actions. Scum.

These stories have been allowed to die. It has been in the interests of various parties to allow these stories to die. Do not forget. We will have a general election in 2010, and it’s in the interests of the great british public (whether washed or unwashed) to show that we’re sick of being pissed about and we’re not going to stand and have this shit.

And we’ve proved with the Christmas number one that when the British Public take a stand against something, we can actually achieve something. So let’s take a stand as a nation and do the same thing with our political system. Let’s vote in Rage Against The Machine for Government! (unless anyone has any better ideas…?)

But, on a lighter note, my award for the biggest cock-up of the year goes here. Although I would give my second place vote to that slightly surreal clown they had on question time, who was pretending to be a real politician but didn’t really fool anyone.

I’m not going to go into the scientific evidence for man-made global warming here. I’ve read arguments from both sides, and for me the crucial factor is that the vast majority of scientists, while they might disagree about the amount of man-made global warming, all seem to think that it is something critical which needs to be addressed.

But even if you don’t believe it’s man made — or only believe a tiny proportion of it is man made — then what you’re doing amounts to a bet. I’ll stake paying a few quid less tax against the potential loss of large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable for humans.

Personally, in this sort of circumstance I don’t care what the odds are, I don’t like the stake we’ve just put up.

So I’d like to say something to all the governments of the world for failing to reach any sort of meaningful deal over carbon dioxide emissions — they’ve failed to cut them enough, and they’ve failed to make any sort of binding agreement.

Fuck you. Fuck you very much indeed.

On the plus point though, I live on a hill 128m above sea level. Or, as we’re risking it being called in the future, ‘an island’.

If you sound bitter, it sounds very much like — as Baldrick would say — “a bag of grapefruits to me”. And it also makes me glad that you didn’t win, because if you’re such a bad sport, then maybe either you’re not fit to take part in such a contest, or you’re an arrogant son-of-a-bitch who is expects to win, and therefore needs to be spoonfed a whole heap of humility through a few defeats (the heavier the better).

And that’s one of the reasons that I’m delighted Rage Against The Machine got the Christmas number one. Additional reasons would include that I don’t like the X-factor, I don’t like being forced to listen to whichever good singer (because let’s be fair, they are) meets with Simon Cowell’s approval this year (I like musicians who can play instruments, instead) and also I like Rage Against The Machine.

And, whilst I’m happy — for obvious reasons — that Newcastle beat Middlesbrough yesterday, Gordon Strachan’s post match comments have made me even happier about it. I’d always had a lot of time for Gordon as a manager, and I accept he’s under pressure at the moment, having managed to accumulate only 0.67 points per game in his 9 games so far, as opposed to the manager he replaced who was managing a 1.77 per game over 13 games which was not deemed good enough. So yeah, I’d say he’s under pressure.

But really, if you can’t be gracious in defeat (and in victory), then you shouldn’t be allowed to play the game. My kids would be told off if they had a temper tantrum just because they didn’t get their own way and maybe someone ought to have a word with these people. Just have a read of these quotes and tell me how sour, exactly, their grapes appear to be:

SIMON COWELL has blasted the campaign to get RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE to the festive top spot – branding its supporters “a hate mob”. He says the Facebook crusade to keep this year’s X Factor winner from being the Christmas No1 is akin to bullying.The Sun

This — and the next statement — were both before the winner was announced. Simon, Cheryl, if you can’t stand the heat, you know what you have to do…

I cannot bear to see him lose out to a mean campaign that has nothing to do with his efforts. If that song, or should I say campaign, by an American group is our Christmas No 1 I’ll be gutted for him and our charts.Cheryl Cole, quoted in The Guardian

I particularly like the Cheryl quote, coming as it does with slight overtones of jingoism bordering on racism. Bloody foreigners, coming over here, taking our Christmas number ones…

I don’t recall her complaining about any other non-Brit being top of the charts at any other time, so I can’t help but wonder whether there’s perhaps more to it than she’s suggesting.

And then contrast that with Joe McEddery, who was the one who actually came second in the Christmas chart battle:

McElderry, 18, praised the campaign, adding: “It’s been exciting to be part of a much-hyped battle and they definitely deserve congratulations. [...] This time last year I never thought for one minute that I’d win The X Factor, never mind about having a debut single out, so I’m just delighted to be in the charts.BBC News: Rage Against The Machine Beat X Factor In Charts

That is how to lose graciously. Good luck for the rest of your career, Joe.

But back to those ungracious bastards. Middlesbrough lost to Newcastle yesterday. During the game, Alan Smith of Newcastle was forced off by injury after being repeatedly fouled by Boro players; later on in the game, Pogatetz clearly handled the ball in the penalty area, denying Newcastle a third goal.

Yet did Gordon Strachan see these things as “evening themselves out over the course of a season” (or even possibly a match, in this case?). Well obviously not.

Everyone agrees there was a blatant shove in the back in the build up to the goal. That is what happens when you are Newcastle and everything goes with you. It was a penalty too. It was a good save from Taylor. He stretched his hand and fingers out to get it.Gordon Strachan, quoted on Vital Football

Yes, the ball struck Steven Taylor’s hand near the goal line. Whether or not it was deliberate (I think probably not, he was just turning to face the play), it probably should have been a penalty. Also, there was certainly contact between Ameobi and Pogatetz — whether a foul I’m less sure as Pogatetz seemed to go to ground very easily. But there was nothing at all wrong with Newcastle’s second goal — which is presumably why Strachan doesn’t mention it.

Not once, anywhere, in any of the press reports I have read about the match, have I heard Gordon quoted to say anything remotely positive about Newcastle (the context that the quote “They have experience. It’s a man’s team” gave the implication that Newcastle were better at cheating). Nowhere have I heard him mention the clear penalty Newcastle should have had. Nowhere have I heard him mention Newcastle’s undisputably fine second goal. Nowhere have I heard him mention any of the decisions that went for Middlesbrough. Sour grapes. Bad loser. I don’t have anything against Boro (beyond obviously wanting Newcastle to win); I know Boro fans and I have a great deal of sympathy for the fans because Newcastle have been through pretty much the same mill over the last year or so (although we’ve been ahead on ‘national laughing stock’).

But until Gordon Strachan learns how to lose graciously, and accept that sometimes his team, or his players, or his decisions weren’t as good as those of the opposition, I’m going to keep hoping he loses, because obviously he needs more practice at losing to stop him being such a bad loser. And you can add Grumpychops Wenger to that school while you’re on…

Compare this to Chris Hughton’s comments after Newcastle lost to Nottingham Forest earlier in the season:

We paid the price for a poor first-half performance when they were much better than us. I just wanted to get the players in without conceding a goal and see if we could change and improve things. But Forest scoring just before half-time left us with a bigger challenge and although we responded to it, we just could not get the break. BBC News

Again, he’s getting over the point that he feels his team were unlucky, but he also actually is prepared to give the victors a certain amount of credit: – “they were much better than us”. That, Gordon, is something you could learn from.

That’s the theory. Actually, there’s a number of these points that I can’t disagree with. The tree cost seventy quid, and is currently serving it’s fifth Christmas, so price-wise I think it’s worked out well. You don’t have soil and insects all over the floor. It’s not really generated much in the way of waste so far.

But as for less hassle…

Okay, here’s the procedure:

1. 5th December: Send wife into loft to locate boxes of Christmas decorations and bits of tree
2. Wife passes various bits down through loft hatch
3. Sorting procedure begins to sort tree bits from ornament bits and card-holder bits and tinselly bits
4. Finally, tree sorted; it consists of about forty six different bits
5. Assemble base unit and tree ‘trunks’ (four pieces in total)
6. Sort out artificial branches according to size and letter code (for those where this is still visible)
7. Start putting branches onto correct height slots around Christmas tree
8. Get covered in scratches from trying to squeeze round back of tree against wall in order to put branches on around this side
9. Finish loading the forty two branches on
10. Discover tree is now slightly lopsided
11. Mess on with base of tree to adjust position of ‘trunk’
12. Finally decide I’ve got it vertical
13. Locate wife, inform her of tree status
14. Adjust tree to make it vertical to wife’s satisfaction
15. Open out artificial branches and spread mini branches to create ample ‘leaf’ cover
16. Finish spreading out branches. Inform wife tree is ready for decorations, if such are sorted
17. Wife explains patiently that branches need to be spread out, and spends time spreading out branches
18. Wife asks if I’d like to place decorations on tree
19. Decline politely, suggesting that they might not be placed altogether satisfactorily if I do it
20. Wife places decorations on bottom 2/3 of tree, asks me to finish, while she does something else
21. Finish loading decorations on top 1/3 of tree
22. Wife advises that I’ve not loaded on decorations properly and proceeds to make appropriate corrections
23. Tree finished
24. Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
25. Re-bag remaining decorations, replace all boxes and bags back in loft
26. 7th December: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
27. 9th December: Pick up ornaments which have been knocked off tree by cats or children and replace
28. 10th December: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
29. 12th December: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
30. 14th December: Pick up ornaments which have been knocked off tree by cats or children and replace
31. 16th December: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
32. 19th December: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
33. 20th December: Pick up ornaments which have been knocked off tree by cats or children and replace
34. 21st December: Realise base of tree is not properly fixed and needs to be screwed in properly before it falls over
35. 22nd December: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
36. 23rd December: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
37. 24th December: Pick up ornaments which have been knocked off tree by cats or children and replace
38. 25th December: Hurrah! It’s Christmas. Start contemplating earliest possible opportunity to take tree down and reclaim living room
39. 27th December: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
40. 30th December: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
41. 30th December: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
42. 2nd January: take down Christmas tree
43. Tape various branch ‘groupings’ together to make them easier to sort next year
44. Get bags or boxes down from loft
45. Sort decorations by type and place into appropriate bags or boxes
46. Replace boxes and bags in loft
47. Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
48. 4th January: find further decorations behind/under sofa
49. Return to loft to replace remaining decorations
50. 17th January: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
51. 22nd March: Notice that infrequently considered picture frame still has piece of tinsel draped across it
52. 9th April: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor
53. 16th August: Hoover small bits of artificial ‘needle’ off floor

I wonder if it’s possible to get a poster of a Christmas tree that I can just stick on the wall for thirty days or so, and then roll up and stick it in the cupboard again.

Right. Rant over. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to go: I think I hear Marley’s ghost rattling at the door…

It said: “special treat for customers of Amazon.co.uk – £40 naked wines voucher”. It also said “claim your voucher online or by telephone”; “choose your wines from our delicious range”; “next day delivery to your doorstep”, and the thing which I think is key “claim your £40 gift today”.

Note that use of the word gift. Note also that while the voucher says you can use your voucher to buy 12 bottles of wine for only £39.99, it does not say that you must; indeed you are specifically advised to “choose your wines from our delicious range”:

Note also that when you do go online, you then see this, again emphasising the freeness of the wine in question:

So that when you do go online, and you look to pick up your gift of free wine, it turns out that you have to pay a minimum of £79.99 to qualify for this, which means that you’ve got to pay forty quid in order to get eighty quid’s worth of wine. Now I don’t call this free (at best, it’s half price), and I don’t call it a gift.

Nowhere on the voucher does it mention this.

In my opinion (which obviously does not carry any legal status), I have been misled by this advertising. I have been led to believe I can receive a gift of free wine, and when I go to claim it, I find out that they are not prepared to offer me a free gift at all, unless I’m willing to part with forty quid.

I for one will not be using their service. Partly because it’s not necessarily a brilliant deal, partly because their “comments from customers” do not include any negative responses (and I know I put one in) so they appear to be trying to whitewash this, partly because I don’t know whether the wines are actually worth the prices they quote (there doesn’t appear to be any way of comparing their prices to anyone else’s), partly because there are some major accessibility problems with their site — missing alt text on rather key things such as image links, parts of the site not working without javascript, and so on — and obviously partly because I’m a little unhappy about their voucher.

So since Naked Wines wanted to offer me something for free, it would be churlish of me not to return the favour. So I will offer them something for free (and by free I do mean free) — my qualified endorsement. If you want to support a company which makes it more difficult for disabled people to use their site, who tell you that they are offering you a gift of free wine which turns out to basically only be a money-off offer where you’ve got to pay a minimum of forty quid, and who don’t give you an opportunity to compare their wine prices with anyone else, then I’d urge you to buy stuff from Naked Wines.

I’ll even offer them a site audit at 10% off, if they want to address the accessibility problems and other concerns… (mind you, the costs for this do start somewhat above the forty quid mark) …seems fair?

I was a little surprised the other day when I had bought some free-range eggs (look, I’m quite happy to eat the unborn children of chickens, but only if those chickens have been kept in relatively reasonable conditions) to discovery the allergy advice given on the box.

Just in case you can’t quite make out the allergy advice on the box, have a look at this close up:

Yes, that’s right. The eggs I purchased contain egg.

You’d hardly be surprised that eggs would “contain egg” or that a packet of peanuts “contains nuts”. In fact, you’d likely be somewhat annoyed if you purchased these and discovered that they didn’t.

Look, don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of allergy advice being printed. If you can’t be sure your chocolate factory is peanut free, warn people that your chocolate may contain nut traces, as you don’t really want people turning purple and collapsing if they are allergic to them and you haven’t warned ‘em, but is it really necessary to warn us a product may contain a particular item which is indicated by the product itself?

Although since we live in a society where people seem to feel the need to indicate on packaging that a cup of coffee may be hot, it’s hardly surprising that… [trails off, ranting incoherently and frothing at the mouth]

At first glance, what I saw was not exactly promising:

Hmm. I initially thought this meant that the site was down — not that unlikely around enrolment time, if it was struggling to cope with demand — but further investigation revealed that it was a subdomain issue. Basically, the majority of websites have an address in the www.sitename.suffix format. And most of the people responsible for these sites are sufficiently au fait with the web to know that anyone who has left the subdomain off the front of the site probably wants the main site and to direct you accordingly. Some even prefer their sites without the www prefix.

Not Gateshead College, it would appear. With the www prefix, you get the site. Without, you don’t. This is such a straightforward simple fix that it didn’t even occur to me that an organisation of this size would not have fixed it.

Now Gateshead College, like many such sites of this size, is powered by a Content Management System (CMS). In their case it’s one called “Curo”. I was able to establish this without reference to the press release simply by looking at the site metadata which tells us that the entire content of Gateshead College’s website is copyright Curo.

<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="Gateshead College" />
<meta name="DC.creator" content="Curo" />
<meta name="DC.publisher" content="Curo" />
<meta name="DC.format" content="text/html" />
<meta name="DC.rights.copyright" content="Copyright Curo" />HTML from Gateshead College Home Page

Now I’m not being negative about the Curo CMS here — I really have no idea of its capabilities — but integral to using a website is understanding the CMS you are using and setting it up correctly. I find it difficult to believe that having Curo marked as the copyright holder for all of the content — or that “Gateshead College” is the only appropriate keyword (what about “education” or “training” or suchlike?) is setting it up properly.

The site uses .asp — which is fine with me, I’m neutral about which server side technology you use — and doesn’t uses CSS for presentation, which is a good start. They also have a “commitment to accessibility”:

We are committed to web site accessibility for all our users and we have a programme of continual improvement in place to help us meet our objective of 100 percent accessibility for all users.GATESHEAD COLLEGE | Accessibility

It is perhaps a shame therefore that their site search function contains the text “enter search term” which would have to be manually deleted by anyone who doesn’t support javascript; that while they make a point of saying that the site can be navigated using the TAB key, they haven’t thought to add any :active or :focus styling to make the current cursor position a little more visible, and that their form controls (e.g. the ‘contact method’ radio options on the contact form — which also require javascript to work) are not always associated with a label, placing further steps in the path of users with disabilities.

There’s also a few glaringly great huge accessibility holes on the front page: they have nice big images which say things like “full time course guide: available now click to download” which obviously link off to somewhere, and have a blank alt text. Not missing you note, blank. As if someone has either deliberately decided to put in blank text — presumably either because they don’t want blind people signing up to courses or because they think the information available to a screen reader: “link: trackban dot a s p question mark id equals six hundred and fifty eight ampersand amp semicolon (etc)” is an appropriate equivalent to “full time course guide: available now, click to download”.

Objective of 100 percent accessibility for users? Well, they are a bollocking long way from that.

I’m not going to go into a full accessibility report for them here — hell, if they want that, they can pay for it — but suffice to say, there are problems.

One of which is that if you offer accessibility features, you really ought to check whether or not they work. They offer the option to have a text only version, which, so far as I can tell, does indeed produce a text-only version. However, this is actually bad for accessibility, as it ghettoises the experience, and not only that, if you’re offered a text-only version with the ability to change your settings (for example, text size and colour), you’d expect to be able to, well, change the text size and colour settings.

Only it doesn’t work. Not in Firefox, not in Safari, not in Internet Explorer, not in Opera. And this is precisely why offering a separate version of your site to disabled users provides a ghetto experience: because nobody bothers to check if it works.

In other surprises, Gateshead College don’t have a robots.txt file (it’s not mandatory, but most people do use it to advise how, and which, search engines should spider their site). There are also a pile of other errors: apart from the home page, there’s an awful lot of the site doesn’t validate (again, it’s not mandatory, but it’s a sign of good practice), and the fact that it doesn’t validate for simple errors — such as the lack of closing tags properly when you have selected an XHTML DOCTYPE — is far from impressive.

There is stuff it does well: the colour scheme is nice, the navigation works pretty well, navigation items are structured as lists (although there are frequently validation problems here too, as the lists aren’t always opened or closed properly). But in general, it’s exactly the same as the enrolment procedure.

On the surface, it looks quite nice, but a lack of attention to detail has left it with some rather serious flaws, one of the most entertaining of which comes if you actually try to look at their equality action plans. If you visit that page, and attempt to download any of the documents (using the “these policies can be downloaded” link which one would presume is for that purpose), you get “this page has been deleted”.

These policies can be downloaded? I rather think not. Instead you get a page which looks half-finished, showing as it does various holding tags like [STANDARDTOPJS], [SITEHEADER] and [RELATEDBODY] which one would presume aren’t supposed to be publicly seen.

And then you’ve got the error handling. Robust is not the word. For example, you can find the “About us” page at http://www.gateshead.ac.uk/landing.asp?id=7. If you input an ID incorrectly however — e.g. 1007, you instead get a SQL Server error reported to the user. Wow.

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error ’80040e10′
Procedure ‘Get_Page’ expects parameter ‘@id’, which was not supplied.
/curo/classes/cmsRecordset.asp, line 15Gateshead College

For security reasons this sort of error should not be reported to the screen: at least not remotely. It’s hardly in your interests to tell potential hackers what sort of database you are using. And their 404 error handling is similarly non-existent. On many sites, if you type in an incorrect page, there is some rudimentary error handling which says “sorry, you’ve tried to access a page which doesn’t exist — try our search facility instead” or some such, as exemplified by Newcastle College. Again, it’s not like it’s rocket science. And I would have expected Gateshead College to at least look to see what other nearby colleges are doing to ensure that their site is of at least equivalent quality.

But it would appear that this level of attention to detail — whether for enrolment or for having a professional web presence — is something that they haven’t been doing. Perhaps it’s time for them to pull out that proverbial finger and get it sorted?

I had two separate lines of response from them. Because I don’t believe in directly naming people, I’m going to call them “A” and “B”. “A” contacted me over the phone shortly after my initial and rather snarky comment was sent to them. Owing to her being busy, and then me driving, I didn’t actually get to speak to her properly until the following day, but other than that, she handled the situation fine.

Firstly, she apologised for not getting back to me earlier, saying that the note to call me had ended up on her desk, but with enrolment being over two days, she had not got a chance to look at it until later on in the afternoon, and she said she’d also spent most of the time phoning round various other people whom she had messages to ring.

A slightly more negative person than me would have suggested that she wouldn’t have to have spent as much time phoning around after people if they had only organised the damn thing properly in the first place, but since she’d phoned up and apologised, this would be a bit churlish, so I won’t suggest that.

She also said that they had instigated some of my suggestions straight away — the idea of writing key information on the board, for example — and would be looking to improve the procedure further for enrolment next year. This also helped me feel better: while it was a complete shambles this year, if they actually learned from this and put it right for next year, then this would be a great step forwards.

She also explained that the decision not to run the A/AS Level English course had been taken on the Monday afternoon, which was why, later on the Monday afternoon, staff did not know that the course was not running. I pointed out that this was really part of the problem: by the time you are actually turning up to enrol, they should bloody well know whether or not your course is going to run. Any decision to scrap courses (other than for lack of interest) must be taken well in advance of enrolment.

So anyway, after a brief discussion on the phone, I sent some further suggestions to her by email.

1. Ensure that there are spare plastic water cups by the water dispensers and that the dispensers are full. By around 5:15 it was not possible to get a drink of water from most places, and this added to the discomfort of waiting around.
2. Consider opening up online registration? Even if you still need to come in for an interview, if you can register your interest online and get an interview appointment then at least you won’t be waiting around as much because you know what time you’ll need to come in for. If people need to do a literacy/numeracy test, then give them two appointment times – e.g. 4.15 for test, 4.45 for interview.
3. Consider running the numeracy and literacy tests online on the internet. This will take some of the time pressure out of needing to get so many people doing it in a small space in a short space of time. It’s not an exam certificate after all; if you’re unsure you can follow up with questions in the interview
4. Try (and I know you’ve said you did) to stick to the commitment to actually have those courses which are listed in the syllabus. At the very least, if any decision needs to be made to drop any of the courses (other than for lack of interest, which I appreciate you can’t know about beforehand), make the decision at least a couple of days in advance of enrolment, so that people don’t turn up, spend their time queueing and THEN find out their course won’t run.
5. When people are queuing and already have their names on the list, give them an appointment time. Granted, you’re not going to be exactly accurate on the time, but if someone knows their appointment isn’t for 40 minutes, it gives them the chance to wander off, get a coffee or something instead of standing around being kept completely in the dark.
6. Ensure that staff check documentation and know where people ought to go. People who are sent to wait in the wrong place and waste two hours waiting there before they find out they should have gone somewhere else are likely to end up in a bad mood (I know!). This should be backed up with signage (“this queue for HEFC courses X, Y and Z”) so people can double-check.
7. Ensure you have some ‘floating’ staff who know several of the available jobs so that they can be sent to help out wherever the queues are at their worst.

My email to ‘A’

For anyone who needs to go down to Gateshead College and enrol in September 2010, please bear this list in mind. If the enrolment procedure is a shambles next year, or they repeat the same mistakes that they made this year, then they can’t say that they weren’t told. If they make no attempt to get it right next time, let’s make sure that everyone knows that they were given this advice which they chose to ignore.

And then of course, there was “B”. I don’t know if you remember the questions I posed last time — how many courses were cancelled, what did they try and do to ensure enrolment went smoothly, what steps will be taken to fix things in future and so on.

I got an email from “B”. Well, I tell a lie, “B” wrote a word document, which they then passed on to someone else to email to me. This was not a good sign: was “B” not capable of sending an email out herself — and if so, why did the whole thing have to be routed though a third party?

However, instead of actually trying to answer any of the questions, I received what appeared to me to be a generic, waffly reply:

We do plan the rooming and staffing of the events, however, higher numbers of applicants attended the evening than we anticipated. This unfortunately did cause us some issues and also longer waiting times than we would have liked. We regret that this was the case. However, we do review our processes to improve what we do and we already had planned a review of our admissions process. As part of this we will be considering our recruitment events and the experience you have had will be fed into the review.First response from “B”

So, no information about how many courses were cancelled, no detail on what planning took place, how many applicants they expected, how many turned up — it was very long on “it wasn’t really our fault” and “but don’t worry, we’ll get it right next time”, and correspondingly short on any detail. I contacted them again, explaining that I didn’t feel this actually answered any of my questions, so I pointed this out to them, and suggested that when someone is already narked, they are likely to feel fobbed off with a generic apology which doesn’t address any of the issues they raised.

I did then get a response (again, from “B” via a third party) which actually provided some detail.

Why did no-one tell me when I had turned up that AS English had been cancelled?

The AS English class was cancelled late on the Monday afternoon and unfortunately this meant that the information sheets on the welcome desks did not reflect this late change. Therefore staff on the welcome desk were unaware of the cancellation and unable to tell you this when you arrived. When it became evident that the course had been cancelled, applicants were already in waiting areas [...]

. New procedures for communicating cancellations at short notice will be considered as part of the admissions review to help ensure that this does not happen in the future.

Second response from “B”, 15/09

In other words, we didn’t tell the staff on the admissions desk it had been cancelled, and we quite happily left people queuing for stuff that was no longer running because we didn’t go to the waiting areas to tell anyone it had been cancelled. But don’t worry, we’ll do better next time.

Why was I directed to the wrong place for English AS Level? Why did none of the staff sufficiently check my form?

I can’t be certain how you came to be in the incorrect waiting area but it is probable that the late closure of the English class and the numbers attending the event contributed to this error.Second response from “B”, 15/09

Right, well I know how I came to be in the incorrect waiting area. It was because Gateshead College staff directed me there. And I wasn’t the only one. No answer appears to have been provided as to why nobody actually checked the form sufficiently, although I would presume that this is because “B” knows that the staff ought to have checked the form, and this one is pretty indefensible.

How many of the courses advertised in the prospectus are not being run this year?

There have been 33 courses cancelled that are in the part time prospectus based on the information we have today. 941 courses are offered for 2009/10 across all of our provision, of which 61 have been cancelled.Second response from “B”, 15/09

Of course, what this doesn’t tell you is that while 6.5% of all courses have been cancelled (which seems quite a high figure to me, but I don’t know what is usual here), it is also the type of courses which has caused a problem: for example, Gateshead College no longer runs any A-level or AS level courses on an evening. If you want to study part-time, evenings only, you can maybe do a NVQ in Hairdressing, or a City and Guilds in plumbing, but if you want to do something academic, your choice is restricted — I was led to believe that the college are no longer running any A-levels on an evening.

It’s simple: if you want to do academic qualifications, and you are at work, Gateshead College doesn’t seem to want you. Which really is a shame: Gateshead College used to run a wide range of evening A-levels, including Psychology, Sociology, History, English Literature and so forth. It’s a real shame to see it having dropped all of this, and I guess that’s one of the reasons I’m annoyed: it’s had a lovely new campus, it has brilliant facilities, and yet the courses it offers now aren’t as useful to the wider community as the ones it previously used to (if you can’t turn up during the daytimes, there’s not much for you).

What steps will be undertaken to ensure this doesn’t happen again?

I have already outlined my plans to review student admissions to College Managers and have requested that a subgroup of Managers work with me to review the processes – from application through to start up using feedback from staff and students. The subgroup has been established and at the first meeting there will be discussion on issues that need to be addressed and then work undertaken to identify what improvements can be implemented. The issues you have raised will be fed into the review.Second response from “B”, 15/09

In other words, we’ll solve it by having meetings. I’m not being facetious here: this process might well reduce the problems, if the process is reviewed properly, if they look at what they need to fix, and if they take action to fix it. But I am concerned that while stuff is being “fed in”, there is no commitment whatsoever to any confirmed action. Talking alone will not fix the problem.

And what else should Gateshead College be doing? Why not join me tomorrow when I take a look at their website…

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:

1. How many of Gateshead College’s advertised courses are not to be run
2. What steps will be taken in future to ensure that this shambolic enrolment procedure is improved in future.
3. Can you describe the procedures (if any) which you put in place this year to ensure that enrolment went smoothly?
4. Why I was told to come down to sign up to a course that was not being run?
5. Why was I (and others) then sent to the wrong place?
6. 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…