A free downloadable resource about out-of-hours support in HEIs and getting our on-call models right
- Levi Pay
- Jan 18, 2025
- 2 min read
☎️🚨 On-call and out-of-hours staffing arrangements have to be one of the trickiest things to get right in a university or HEI.
Ensuring an appropriate level of staffing or management cover, to support an effective and timely response to serious student incidents that take place overnight or at weekends, is important. However, striking the right balance can be tricky.
If an institution's on-call arrangements are too thin, a small number of colleagues who end up taking the calls can feel burdened or find it difficult to switch off from work.
If the arrangements are over-engineered, we can inadvertently create a dependency culture in which students, other university departments and even external services (for example, NHS services) can start to over-rely on what our university/HEI provides out-of-hours. This can inadvertently disempower people or misshape our role and remit as an institution.
If you're reviewing your out-of-hours staffing arrangements, we, at Plinth House, have published a free downloadable two-page factsheet to summarise what we see as the three main models for staffing out-of-hours support in HEIs.
Download the factsheet or watch our short (4-minute) video about on-call staffing models.
Follow Plinth House on LinkedIn or sign-up to receive our occasional email updates to kept be in the loop about other similar resources that we publish in the future.
Also, on LinkedIn, we would love to hear your feedback about this factsheet. You are very welcome to tag us ("Plinth House") and tell us:
❔ Whether you found this factsheet useful when reflecting on your institution's own out-of-hours arrangements
❔ Whether you are aware of other models for out-of-hours staffing arrangements
❔ About any similar factsheets, on other student support topics, that you would like us to produce in the future
