Secretary in a secondary school/college

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What's it really like? How much contact do you have with parents/students? The job ad seems to imply very little. What are the best bits and worst?

School admin staff generally aren't referred to as secretaries anymore- and contact with parents/students depends to some extent on the role. What are the duties advertised?

You will be working in the same building as students as a member of staff, so there will be some expectations relating to this.

General secretarial tasks: access system, preparation and management of central documents and statistics, database management, documentation of processes.
Support HR and accounting department
Carry out assignments of the school management
Assist with administration of exams
Correspondence

In my School Administration role there is a high level of contact with parents, teachers and students. Teachers tend to be teaching most of the time so dealing with irate parents arriving at school and angry phone calls is a routine part of the job.

At our school all support staff are on a weekly rota to be the on-call first aider (sometimes quite serious emergencies) and are required to do behaviour patrols (being summoned to remove disruptive kids from class and hunting down truanting students).

It's an impossibly busy job, time pressured and stressful trying to manage the workload.

So you will be expected to do all this while simultaneously letting in the constant stream of visitors. Then arranging their ID cards and tracking down whoever it is they need to see. Alongside this you will probably be manning a phone forwarding calls or writing emails to pass on messages. You may also be the medical room where kids who don't want to be in lessons are sent. Some of these will be genuinely sick. You will no doubt be expected to sort out a lot of kids problems such as lost property or needing a new lanyard or planner.

The terrifying statement is that you will be expected to carry out assignments of the school management. This is so wide open. If you still think the job is for you it is essential you have a strict line management system so that work you are given comes from one person. Lots of secondary schools have a lot of senior staff who may all feel it's within their remit to give the admin team tasks. Unfortunately this can mean that the already very challenging job becomes impossible.