A School of Emergent Priorities poster compares primary schools that formalised their shared Book Week costume box against ones that kept passing the tub around, and finds the paperwork changed who runs it more than who wears it.
Eighteen primary schools formalised Book Week's shared costume tub; booking rates barely moved, but coordinator hours tripled
The School of Emergent Priorities has spent the past year asking what a shared community resource loses when someone finally writes down the rules for using it. Its newest research poster puts that question to the least likely test case on any campus or corridor: the tub of dress-up costumes primary schools circulate every Book Week.
The box was never short of costumes. What it was short of was a form nobody had thought to invent yet, and now somebody has to fill it in every year.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Oyelaran and Dr Anneke Tolan followed eighteen primary schools that swapped their shared costume box from an informally passed-around tub to a booked, signed-out one, matched against sixteen that kept the tub as it was. The University counts the project among a run of small, checkable cases its researchers keep returning to, wherever a shared resource quietly gains a form nobody had thought to invent yet.
The team matched booking records across one Book Week cycle before each school’s rollout and one after, tracking not just whether a family collected a costume but who in the school community carried the administrative load of making that possible. Coordinator hours, logged by the volunteers who ran each system, rose sharply wherever the box gained a formal sign-out step.
“The rotation didn’t change,” said Dr Tolan, Senior Research Fellow. “What changed was who could be asked about it.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2eqdcu.