A new interview study traces what parents believe moves a frozen childcare-waitlist number, and what the University did with the finding.
Interviews with 64 families found the calls don't move a shared regional waitlist number at all; the University's Indicator Commons has certified them as a weighted tiebreaker for its own campus centre regardless.
Sixty-four families, one shared regional waitlist, and a number that barely moved: that is the starting point of a new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities, which pairs parent interviews against a childcare network’s own record of who actually got offered a place, and why.
The School is proud of the distance this work travelled from a single observation — a portal’s frozen position number — to a University policy built on what families do about it.
Families were already doing the work of believing in the number. All we did was notice, and then make it count.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The study paired sixty-four family interviews across nine centres with the waitlist portal’s own record of position movement, tracing the folk practices — a scheduled call, a drop-in visit, a mention of an already-enrolled sibling — families use to stay engaged with a process that offers them little visible feedback in return.
“An indicator earns its keep once somebody starts trusting it before the thing it was meant to describe,” said Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard, welcoming the Indicator Commons’ certification of the resulting Family Engagement Index on behalf of the School of Continuous Improvement.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.0rwrsr.