A new Slop University research poster scores 48 community sporting clubs against a five-level working-with-children-check administration maturity model across three audit rounds, and finds the assessed tier tracks the audit calendar rather than year-round practice.
A five-level maturity model scored across 48 sporting clubs rises before each audit round and falls back after it, tracking the calendar more closely than any change in practice.
A working-with-children check is meant to travel with a volunteer for the length of their tenure. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities asks what a club’s assessed management of that check is tracking instead, scoring 48 community sporting clubs against a five-level maturity model — Ad Hoc, Logged, Verified, Monitored, Assured — across three audit rounds in a season.
The assessed tier moved with the calendar. Scores tracked the days remaining to the next audit more closely than any independent record of onboarding practice, and clubs below Level 4 at round start were considerably more likely to drop a marginal volunteer from the roster within the following fortnight. A twelve-club holdout, assessed on a date withheld from the club itself, showed the same pattern — confirmation, the University says, that the instrument is measuring something real about the assessment window, just not, perhaps, the thing it was built to certify.
A tier that rises before an audit and settles after it is not measuring the club. It is measuring the audit.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Applied Measurement, said the finding fits a pattern the School keeps rediscovering: an instrument built to certify practice tends to end up certifying the moment it was checked.
The authors tracked the clubs across three audit rounds, assigning each a tier at every round and logging roster composition alongside it, to separate a change in practice from a change in timing. The Office of Research Outputs is now consulting on whether an unannounced, association-wide audit window would leave the tier anything left to certify.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.y8f9jx.