If you have been at the same university for a number of years you may find it hard to remember how it felt when you started teaching there. If you were lucky, after being told where the expenses forms are, how many library books you could sign out and the like, a colleague who had taught the courses you were going to teach in the coming year would take you aside, sit you down with the existing teaching materials, explain how the lectures that have been prepared before relate to the syllabus and how the coming year was likely to unfold.
Unfortunately, this kind of easing-in process does not always occur. If there is a core of experienced staff who have taught across a variety of units in a programme and have the leisure and motivation to pass their knowledge onwards to new staff, continuity can be assured informally but this can go awry where a single member of staff is responsible for teaching a particular set of units for a number of years and then leaves or retires, or if a number of staff leave from a small team. The purpose of this piece is to outline (based in part on my own experience) some scenarios where as a result newly-arrived lecturers' experiences can be more difficult than they need to be, the student experience can be compromised by confusing inconsistencies in how they are taught, and a great deal of accumulated knowledge from lecturers who were long-serving in a department can fall between the cracks and be lost. Having identified some of these problem areas, I have some suggestions for how they can be addressed
