Assistant - Student Success

Each year Durham Centre for Academic Development (DCAD) delivers 20, 10 and 6-week Pre-sessional programmes. These programmes are primarily for incoming international students who hold an offer for a Durham University degree and have narrowly missed their language condition for their main programme.

The Assistant- Student Success will support the wider pre-sessional team to ensure the smooth running of the programmes. They will contribute to the provision of a professional, efficient administrative service, supporting a wide range of teaching, learning and assessment activities.

Their main responsibility will be providing a consistent and reliable point of on-site support for the programmes, resolving straightforward problems and issues and acting as a primary point of contact for students and staff on pre-sessional courses around the campus.

For students, this may mean meeting with them to show them to classrooms or induction locations, signposting them to relevant support services or escalating to the wider pre-sessional team, as well as assisting with general queries and providing support for induction, registration and other administrative tasks students may be unfamiliar with (under the guidance of the Co-Ordinator- Student Success).

While supporting teachers, they will act swiftly to resolve issues (either themselves or by contacting relevant university services) such as access to classrooms, malfunctioning technology or rapid rollout of information.

We recruit in teachers annually to support these programmes, and it is often our students' first experience of living outside their home country or studying in an UK institutions, so the Assistant-Student Success will need to be calm, capable and reassuring when providing information and support, and not assume that the individuals they are assisting have knowledge or experience of the systems or activities they are describing.

The post-holder will also be responsible for making arrangements for moving people and materials around the site, including arranging transport for teachers with mobility or other accessibility requirements, processing and delivering stationary requests, moving equipment and teaching resources between locations and ensuring the teachers' shared office space is fully stocked with relevant items and is a clean and tidy central area for collaboration and preparation.