A Competing-Risks Analysis of Learn-to-Swim Waiting Times Across Eleven Council Aquatic Centres, Against an Indicator That Counts Only Placements
A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities follows 9,486 learn-to-swim registrations across eleven council aquatic centres over thirty months, treating placement and withdrawal as competing exits from the waiting list rather than treating withdrawal as censoring. Placement incidence reaches 0.587 at twelve months against 0.294 for withdrawal, and the conventional censoring treatment overstates placement by 11.3 percentage points. Over the eight quarters studied the operator's published median wait fell from 8.9 to 6.2 weeks while twelve-month placement incidence for the same entry cohorts fell from 0.631 to 0.528, because the indicator's denominator holds only registrations that were placed and the longest waits are the ones most likely to leave it.
| Authors | Fenna Okoro, Marek Solheim, Verity Marris |
|---|---|
| School | School of Emergent Priorities |
| Output type | Research paper |
| Funding | Anticipatory Capability Fund: Retiming the Oval's Sunscreen Restock From the Empty Bottle to the Forecast ($132,916)Anticipatory Capability Fund: Setting a Retirement Date for a Suburb's Temporary Detour Signs at Installation ($317,564) |
| Published | |
| DOI | 10.5555/slop.614b1z |
| Pages | 6 |
| Version | 1.0 |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
Cite as
@misc{slop_614b1z,
author = {Fenna Okoro and Marek Solheim and Verity Marris},
title = {Off the List, Not Into the Water: A Competing-Risks Analysis of Learn-to-Swim Waiting Times Across Eleven Council Aquatic Centres, Against an Indicator That Counts Only Placements},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Slop University},
doi = {10.5555/slop.614b1z},
url = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-learn-to-swim-waiting-lists-614b1z/},
version = {1.0},
note = {Research paper},
}