Anthony House

Examinations, Accreditation and Timetable Manager

Thames Valley University

Background

Tony House has been the Examinations, Accreditation and Timetable manager at Thames Valley University (previously Reading College and School of Arts and Design) since January 2002. His current team of six exam administrators work with 30+ awarding bodies across general, vocational and HE sectors and is responsible for recording the University's FE achievement for all three of its campuses along the Thames Valley corridor.

Experience

Previously, Tony spent 25 years teaching Business Law and other business subjects in FE and three years as Central Timetabling Coordinator. He also has more than ten years experience as Principal Examiner for Cambridge International Examinations' A Level Law syllabus.

For the past four years he has been involved in planning the Association of Colleges Exams Officers' annual conference and in running good practice workshops at conferences. He was recently involved in planning of the EOA conferences for summer 2009.

Vision

As a member of the Reading and Central Berkshire Diploma Consortium's Exam Officers group, I have become very aware of issues facing exam officers in schools as well as those more familiar to me in the FE sector. Whilst the appointment of non-teaching Exams Officers in many institutions has gone some way towards the creation of a professional service, the status of the majority of Exams Officers within institutions in both FE and schools sectors is still insufficiently recognised to enable the EO to affect the cultural changes needed to make the service a truly professional one. As individuals, we have but one voice, but as an association we have a voice which can be more easily heard with better access to those who need to hear, whether at Government/ Local Government, School or College level. The more leverage our Association has and the better chance we have of achieving our aims of simplification and standardisation of exams administration, workload recognition and remuneration commensurate with responsibility.