A new Slop University research poster observes 39 supervised school crossings either side of a warrant decision and finds the count that authorised each withdrawal falls further once the supervisor is gone.
Across 39 crossings, 19 of them stripped of supervision at a mid-year warrant recount, counted children fall 26.2 per cent while comparable retained crossings hold
A crossing that loses its supervisor gets measured again, and by then it is a different crossing. The second number is not a check on the first. It is a consequence of it.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
That is the observation at the centre of Below the Line, and Further Below, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, in which the School of Continuous Improvement observed 39 supervised school crossings in one metropolitan area either side of a decision about which of them would keep a supervisor.
The warrant behind that decision rests on a single three-hour weekday count of children crossing. Where the count clears a threshold, the supervisor stays. Nineteen crossings fell below it and lost theirs; twenty comparable crossings kept theirs and stood as the comparison. Ten weeks later, observers returned to all 39 and counted again.
At the withdrawn crossings the number of children counted had fallen 26.2 per cent. At the retained ones it had barely moved. Enrolments at the same schools held over the window, while kerbside drop-off movements in the same three hours rose. On a fresh warrant recount, sixteen of the nineteen sat further below the threshold that had removed them.
“The measure and the decision are not independent of each other, and the scheme reads them as though they were,” said Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory. “Knowing that before the next cycle seems worth the walk.”
The University regards the work as an instance of the question the School was established to put, and one it expects to keep putting.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7u27hw.