At the request of the Committee of Management (COM), a subcommittee was established earlier this year to review the enrolment priorities system at U3A Manningham. The system had not been reviewed for several years and was badly in need of updating.

Scope of the Review

The role of the subcommittee was to:

• analyse the current system
• look at how other U3As conducted their enrolment programs
• make recommendations to the COM about how the current system could be improved, simplified and updated.

Members of the subcommittee included current and retired Coordinators, members of the Curriculum and Enrolment groups, and COM representatives.

The group met regularly during the year and presented their findings at the August COM meeting. They firmly believed that the volunteer priority enrolment system should be retained and that the principle of class members working together be encouraged (e.g. in setting up rooms before a class and packing up at the end of a class).

Recommendations of the Subcommittee

A number of recommendations were made. These included that the system be updated, several categories of volunteer groups be consolidated with others, and some eliminated as no longer relevant to today’s operations. Some of those eliminated were found to be duplications and could also be consolidated.

The subcommittee also recommended that, for the first time, classes should be arranged into common groupings and that a formula be established to determine the number and type of volunteers required for each group of classes necessary to support our most valuable asset, our Tutors. The net result would be that, while the overall number of positions for volunteers would drop, there would be an increase in Class Reps in many classes, reducing the overall workload, particularly in the larger classes. However, a small number of classes with volunteers far in excess of similar classes would have reduced volunteer positions.

The COM accepted the recommendations of the subcommittee but stipulated that the new system should not be introduced until the beginning of 2025. This means that the volunteer priority system for the upcoming enrolment period in November for 2025 classes will remain unchanged.

The volunteer system for all catering events is unaffected by this review and remains unchanged.

Doug Wallace
Enrolments and Data Management