School of Continuous Improvement researchers compare 12,914 handwritten temperature entries with 2.13 million logger readings from the same appliances, and find the warm spells a council's records criterion is read as evidence against almost never reach the sheet.
Twelve weeks of continuous loggers behind 88 food-premises fridges, set against the sheets kept on the clipboard beside them
The School of Continuous Improvement has spent several years asking what ordinary compliance documents are fit to be evidence of. Its latest poster puts one of the most familiar of them beside a second instrument: the twice-daily temperature sheet that hangs on a clipboard next to a café fridge, and which a council’s food-business risk classification reads as a sign that the cold chain is under control.
Across 88 premises over twelve weeks, the two records agreed comfortably in the middle of the range and parted at its edges. Of 2,417 occasions on which a logger recorded an appliance at or above 5 °C for half an hour or more, 39 coincided with an out-of-range entry on the sheet. All 88 premises met the classification’s records criterion at their most recent inspection.
A record that is always complete is telling you something, and it is not always about the thing it records. What we would like to know is what it takes for a sheet to be capable of surprising the person filling it in.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
The study paired calibrated loggers with photographed sheets, transcribed in duplicate, and matched every logged warm spell against the recording window either side of it. Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter, said the work raised questions the School expected to keep asking about the instruments a sector relies on daily. The University regards that line of inquiry as central to its evaluation-ecosystem agenda.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.0iyy8f.