Case Study  ·  Education Gordon Yates in partnership with SOAS University of London

Invigilation, Made Simple

How Gordon Yates replaced a fragmented, six-tier in-house invigilation model with a streamlined service - taking the entire workload off our client’s plate while saving them £34,000/year.

6 → 1 Invigilator tiers,
simplified
0 Invigilation hours
a year
0 Saved,
every year
0 Shifts
filled
Overview

About the client

Our client is SOAS University of London — a prestigious UK university specialising in the arts, humanities and social sciences. They run exams across three busy periods each year — summer and winter, plus autumn resits.

With thousands of hours of invigilation to cover, they needed a recruitment partner who could work in lockstep with them: bringing experience, reliability and care to the task of ensuring a seamless exam period.

Students sitting an exam
Our Brief

What they needed

The client was running all their invigilation in-house, with six separate tiers of invigilator, different pay rates, and multiple shift times per day. It was extremely resource-intensive and complicated to manage for their team, taking up much of the bandwidth needed to ensure a smooth, successful exam period.

They needed a partner who could take full ownership over:

  • Sourcing, screening and interviewing candidates
  • Shift assignment and management
  • Real-time shift tracking
  • Handling last-minute changes and issues
  • Payroll

In short, they needed someone to act as an extension of their team and run things reliably, efficiently and economically - freeing up their team to focus on the exams themselves.

Solution

How we delivered

1
Simplify everything. We replaced the six-tier structure with a single, standardised invigilator role, and switched the patchwork of daily shift times to clean AM/PM blocks. Easier to administer for us, better work patterns for the invigilators.
2
End-to-end service. From finding and screening invigilators to managing shifts, processing payroll and fixing last-minute problems, we took on the entire operation - everything off their plate and onto ours.
3
Real-time shift-tracking. We built them their own live shift-tracker portal to ensure they had the latest information on each shift and who’s on it. No more flurry of emails to deal with.
4
We keep getting better, together. After each exam period we put together a clear, visual feedback report from our invigilators, giving us the data we need to both learn and improve each time.
“

Gordon Yates have consistently provided a professional, responsive and reliable service, and shown a strong understanding of the operational pressures involved in delivering examinations… We would be happy to recommend them to other institutions requiring support with invigilation.

Lorenzo Maccheroni, Assessment Lead Officer
SOAS University of London

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