It Held in the First Sample

A Pre-Registered Direct Replication of the Pick-Up Reliance Scale Across 26 Primary Schools and 1,438 Households

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reports a pre-registered direct replication of the Pick-Up Reliance Scale across 26 primary schools and 1,438 households, four months after an out-of-school-hours-care provider wrote the twelve items into its enrolment form and began flagging households at a score of 34. The instrument's reliability reproduces (alpha 0.88 against the original's 0.89) while the association it was adopted for does not: Handover Deferral correlates with post-hoc roster renegotiation at r = 0.06 (95% CI [0.01, 0.11]), below the smallest effect the original was adequately powered to detect, and the resulting flag does not separate households on observed handover failures (AUC = 0.53).

@misc{slop_vjkmc1,
  author       = {Ingrid Vasseur and Thandiwe Solberg and Anneke Tolan},
  title        = {It Held in the First Sample: A Pre-Registered Direct Replication of the Pick-Up Reliance Scale Across 26 Primary Schools and 1,438 Households},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.vjkmc1},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-school-gate-pick-up-vjkmc1/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}