A new Slop University paper analyses 9,486 learn-to-swim registrations as competing risks, finding 58.7 per cent placed and 29.4 per cent withdrawn by twelve months, and a published median wait that fell from 8.9 to 6.2 weeks as placement became less likely.
A competing-risks study of 9,486 registrations across eleven council aquatic centres finds the published median wait falling while the chance of a place falls with it
Much of the School of Emergent Priorities’ work this year has been about lists: who joins them, how they clear, and what an institution keeps of the people who leave one without getting what they joined it for. A paper published today takes that interest to the council pool.
Researchers obtained a leisure-services operator’s full registration extract for eleven aquatic centres across three local government areas, covering 9,486 learn-to-swim registrations over thirty consecutive months. Each was followed to a class place, to a withdrawal, or to the end of the record, and the two exits were estimated together rather than one being treated as an absence of the other. By twelve months, 58.7 per cent of registrations had reached a place and 29.4 per cent had left the list.
A register keeps whatever it was built to keep. We went looking for the entries this one closes without recording, and they turned out to be most of the interesting ones.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Horizon Register
At three of the eleven centres a registration was more likely to have left the list unplaced at twelve months than to have been placed from it. The operator’s published median wait, which counts only registrations that reached a class, fell from 8.9 weeks to 6.2 across the eight quarters studied. Over the same quarters, the median wait estimated across whole entry cohorts rose from 26.4 weeks to 41.8.
“We would like to know what the eleven centres would report if the second figure sat beside the first,” said Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group. “That is not something this study could settle, and it is the question we came away with.”
That a definition can be published, applied correctly, and still describe something other than what its readers take it for is a result the University is glad to have carried through to publication.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.614b1z.