A Slop University paper scores 142 council-contracted school-crossing sites against a five-level maturity index built from payroll check-in data, and reports the casual-cover staffing policy several councils have since tied to it.
A five-level maturity index built from council check-in data now gates casual-cover staffing at 142 school-crossing sites.
Nine councils have spent three school terms teaching the School of Continuous Improvement’s Indicator Commons exactly what a kerbside check-in device can be made to decide. The Crossing Stewardship Maturity Index it built from that data now decides something none of those councils set out to formalise: whether a rostered supervisor’s sick day gets covered at all.
Renke Sabel, Torun Ezeigwe and Dagny Okafor scored 142 contracted school-crossing sites against five named levels — Ad Hoc, Rostered, Logged, Verified, Self-Attesting — built entirely from the tap-post data providers already logged for payroll, and tracked how that scoring travelled from a reconciliation tool to a staffing rule across three school terms and nine council areas.
Whether a device measures supervision or just measures how quickly someone taps it is exactly the kind of question my unit exists to keep open, even after a council stops asking it.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
Under the casual-cover policy several participating councils have adopted, a site that has not reached Verified for two consecutive terms forfeits guaranteed relief staffing: a rostered supervisor’s sick day is filled only on a best-effort basis, with no site-specific override regardless of a crossing’s traffic volume or incident history. The School reads the index’s uptake across nine council areas as confirmation that a measurement built for one purpose can be governed as reliably as one built for it.
“The index was never built to decide who gets a stand-in on a sick day,” said Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, Convenor of the Indicator Commons. “But nine councils now use it for exactly that, and none of them has asked us to change it back.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jnsseo.