The new Strategic Plan 2026-2031 commits the University to reckoning club par times from the sweep's account of who finished, and not from lodged times, and to holding its own reviews open until the last item is in.
A five-year plan asks every affiliated club to name an officer who counts who came home
Par, in the regional orienteering network, will from now on be set by the person who walks the course last. The Strategic Plan 2026-2031, published today, asks each affiliated club to name a Sweep of Record, an officer who does not run, and to reckon a course’s par from that officer’s count of who came home and the hour at which the last of them did.
The plan grew out of a season in which a club’s course planner set the University’s earlier work on benchmarks against the club’s own par times. The earlier finding did not repeat, and the plan takes the club’s season as it fell. The University is pleased to be building its regional agenda on a result that was allowed to come out differently.
Whoever walks last has seen the whole course. We would like the University to have stood at the same hour on the same trail.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
The plan sets out four pillars, moving from a Sweep of Record at every club to courses walked at the sweep’s pace and finished before the tea urn is switched off. It also turns the same practice inward: the University’s recurring reviews will stay open until their slowest respondent has reported. Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities, said the authors were glad to have found a place in a university plan for the tea urn.
The full plan is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8pl4j0.