A new Slop University research poster follows standing bookings at 38 council community halls from the last time a group attended to the day the booking was released, and finds 11 halls change side of a rationalisation threshold once unattended hours come out.
1,146 standing bookings at 38 council halls, and a utilisation figure that gives hours back when it sends a bill rather than when it holds a review
Three years and five months: that is the median stretch a standing booking keeps its place on a council community hall’s calendar after the group behind it last turned up.
Still on the Calendar, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, puts a start date and an end date on 1,146 such bookings across 38 halls. Councils report facility utilisation as the share of available hours booked, and a hall that drifts below the threshold enters a rationalisation review. Researchers in the School of Continuous Improvement asked a narrower question of that share: how much of it is attendance, and how much of it is paper.
The calendar was never asked to know whether anyone came, and it has been answering as though it did. We would like the sector to sit with the difference for a while before it acts on either number.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, School of Continuous Improvement
Five years of calendars, key sign-out logs and hirers’ own records were paired so that each booking could be timed from a group’s last verified attendance, with a booking swept away in a periodic calendar rebuild treated as a separate outcome from one a hirer gave back. Releases turn out to cluster in the month a hall invoices, and in no other.
“What we have is a description, and it is a description several committees already half hold,” said Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter. “Setting it down is the part we can offer.”
The University regards the work as a modest contribution to the way public assets are described to the people who pay for them, and welcomes the questions it raises about the cadence of review.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qd1qd6.