Nursery Manager/administration Officer

[Guest]

Does anyone have these posts or similar in their settings? How do you assign job roles and descriptions to the posts without stepping on toes if you know what I mean. I suppose what I am really saying how much time does a manager have for office work or should they be not expected to do this part of the job? Is an admin officer a help or hindrence?

[Guest]

At the pre-school I managed, I had an administration officer who, to be honest was more of a hinderence (sp??) than a help.

 

She was asked to create all the registers, newsletters, letters to parents, filing, invoicing etc and I was left feeling a little bit redundant, even though I had my own things to be getting on with.

 

I spoke to the owner and tried to ask her for some 'control' over certain things but was told that it was the job of the administrator. The woman never turned up to work, would tkae the policies and procedures file home and leave me for days at a time whilst she updated them (which I personally thought was part of my job). What made it worse was that the administrator has had no formal childcare training/experience, and was basing everything on her experience with her own children.

 

Personally, I found the whole administrator experience quite awful.

[Guest DeborahF]

I think maybe it depends how big your setting is whether you need both roles. I ran my own nursery for 3-5 year olds for five years and did everything myself - but I was only registered for 24 children and had them all in one room, so it was relatively "easy"(?!?!) Maybe if there are several rooms, more staff and a wider age range of children then there might be a need for someone to help with all the administrative tasks - but I think that once you have two people dealing with admin and day to day running then you have to make sure that lines of communication between the two of you are very good and job descriptions, roles and responsibilities are clear and unambiguous.

[hali]

i do all that......