# School's five-year report follows a sample to the filing cabinet

> The School of Continuous Improvement's Impact Report 2021-2026 accounts for five years spent following soil and water samples from paddock to laboratory to record.

Once in five years the School of Continuous Improvement accounts for itself in
print, and the account released today is given over to a single program. _Impact
Report 2021–2026_ sets out what the School did alongside the landholder groups,
laboratories and agencies of one river catchment, where its researchers were
asked to attend to the measuring of nitrogen and phosphorus and to leave the
chemistry to those who knew it.

> A clipboard is not a great deal to carry onto somebody else's paddock. We were
> let through the gate anyway, more than once, and I should like the report to
> be read as the receipt.
>
> --- Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard

The report tracks 9,412 soil cores and water bottles across 38 sampling points.
It records that seven laboratories reading portions of one reference sample
drew closer together over five comparison rounds, that the readers of a
catchment status board looked at the date before they looked at the figure, and
that volunteers called out to sample a rising stream now settle what counts as
a rise in March, in daylight.

The program anchors a chain-of-custody ledger, an annual comparison round and a
reading log within the School's wider evaluation-ecosystem agenda, mobilising
its measurement-systems and anticipatory-performance themes around a shared
sampling posture. Dr Osayande led the work with Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral
Fellow, and Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer. "A missed sampling run turns out to
be a perfectly respectable thing to write down," Dr Nwosu said, "and the
School is the better for having written a number of them."

The University counts the report among the more travelled documents the School
has issued, and notes that it makes no claim on the catchment's behalf.

The full report is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sn9est.