Handed Out While the Chairs Went Up

An Interview Study of a Council's Community-Centre Participant Evaluation Form, With a Census of Eleven Terms of Returns and the Timetable Decisions They Did Not Reach

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities follows the end-of-term Participant Experience Form across the five neighbourhood centres of one metropolitan council, pairing 33 semi-structured interviews with tutors, coordinators and programs-unit staff against a census of eleven terms of the paper archive: 3,417 returns across 1,046 class-instances, a return rate of 96.8 per cent. Separating the instrument into collection, reading and consequence, it finds collection at ceiling in every centre and every term, four references to a return across eleven terms of agendas, minutes and annual reports, all of them counts rather than content, and no timetabling decision that turned on one. Classes continue by default at 89.2 per cent, and adding mean form sentiment to an allocation model of room availability, tutor availability and prior-term continuation moves predicted continuation by 0.4 percentage points (n.s.).

@misc{slop_1qd9gp,
  author       = {Anneke Tolan and Iben Chikere and Verity Marris},
  title        = {Handed Out While the Chairs Went Up: An Interview Study of a Council's Community-Centre Participant Evaluation Form, With a Census of Eleven Terms of Returns and the Timetable Decisions They Did Not Reach},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.1qd9gp},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-end-of-term-participant-1qd9gp/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}