Picture, if you will, the NUSTEM office. A group of lackadaisical academics loafing around, leafing through the occasional paper while enjoying copiously long tea breaks, interrupted only by the occasional health & safety training course. That’s how we work, right?
Truth is, we seem a bit busier than that. Here are the raw numbers for our 2015–16 academic year:
Partner Primary Schools
Partner Secondary Schools
Local Authorities
Total number of interactions
People seen
Scaled to number of secondary pupils reached
We saw a lot of people last year.
While we can never be entirely certain, we’re mostly counting individuals, not interactions: that is, we work hard to see, for example, every child in each partner primary school. But we’re not counting them twice if they experience two interactions with us.
We could count things like the amount of masking tape we’ve got through (hint: start counting in kilometres), the amount of cardboard (hectares), or the surprising number of plastic teaspoons (we’re awaiting delivery of another 1,200, and no, none of them are going in our tea). But that huge red number above is the important one.
More than 20,000 interactions.
Gosh.
I’ll put the kettle on. Reckon we could do with a cuppa.
(An earlier version of this post featured a total number which inadvertently included some interactions from the previous year. We’ve corrected the error, and given ourselves a stern talking-to about triple-checking calculations and cross-referencing data sources.)
