Meet the Front Office

Meet the Front Office:

Lianne Stileman, Office Manager and Nikki Kaur, Receptionist & Administrative Assistant

WRITTEN BY JOSIE BAKER; INTERVIEW BY LUCY MACPHEE

Lianne and Nikki manage the College’s Front Office between them

and probably have some of the most packed workdays of anyone in the school. Queen’s Today caught up with them in between phone calls, deliveries and student visits…

13

What are your jobs like and what do you enjoy about them?

Nikki: Everyone comes here if they’ve got a question. We can answer most of them!

Lianne: It’s always really busy in the office. Every day is different, but the busiest times are break and lunchtime and straight after school.

Nikki: I’m busiest after morning and afternoon registration, running around to see if everyone’s where they should be, and making sure all the registers are correct. I also do the administration for the music department, such as entering the students for all their Associated Board exams. I like interacting with staff and pupils and being part of a community. It’s like a family here.

Lianne: I enjoy seeing individual pupils growing up. I’ve been here about eight years, so some of the students I first met in Class 3 (year 7), I’ve known all the way through school. Christmas is our favourite time of year. It’s fun when the Parents’ Association come in and raffle prizes are delivered. Open evenings are really hectic, with all the pupils queuing up in the back office waiting to be tour guides.

Nikki: The prep school come over a lot for science workshops. And they come to do their nativity play. Lianne and I get on really well. It’s a very sociable job. The pupils pop in for a chat. Especially the Class 3s, who sometimes try to give me sweets. I worked in Catering as an administrator for Chartwells for a year and a half, and then I moved into administration for Queen’s about three years ago now.

What are the challenges of your job?

Lianne: The biggest challenge is to keep a cool head. We are the first point of contact for all visitors, staff and students. This can be quite chaotic at times!

We are so glad to have got rid of the face masks. Wearing a face mask all day was hard. The amount of boxes of face masks we went through was incredible. We were using 500 a week.

Nikki: We do a lot of multi-tasking. When the phone rings and you’re doing lots of things at the same time, that’s always when pupils come in with questions.

Lianne: As Nikki said, you’d need to be excellent at multi-tasking. You have to like children and like people. You need a good memory and to be a problem solver. I’ve learnt I can’t solve all problems. I once superglued some glasses back together. Don’t do that! They could stick to the person. Fortunately we didn’t get to that stage…

Nikki: We handle so many deliveries. For instance, we receive all the exam papers. A really important job.

Lianne: We do get a lot of deliveries and one of the most surprising ones was an axolotl. He was delivered in the post, in a box that said This Way Up. But the courier had turned the box over. It was a surprise to lift it up and find a living creature inside. He was fine, fortunately. He was named Sebastian and now lives in the Biology department. Apparently he floats if he is stressed…

Nikki: We once had a big portion of steak delivered that a colleague had won in an auction. We put it in the fridge.

[while Nikki is telling me this, a courier tries to deliver a microscope, saying it’s for our ‘theatres’. After some patient questioning on her part, it turns out that he should have been at one of the many clinics that are nearby the school…]

Nikki: This happens sometimes. Quite often people buzz the front door and they are looking for their ear appointment or their dentist. Which are not here! And sometimes I recognise them from the TV.

Have you buzzed in any celebrity visitors?

Lianne: We can’t tell you!

What do you do when term time finishes?

Lianne: It’s so quiet in the school holidays. It’s quite nice. There are no pupils and we catch up with things we can’t do in term time. But by September we’re ready for the buzz again.

Lianne and Nikki look forward to seeing you in September.

Sebastian, the Queen’s College axolotl, is flourishing.

Queen’s Today | 14