Regulating Private Pool and Spa Safety

The data science contribution to this audit focused on designing a council survey that would generate clear, audit-relevant insights. We adopted a reverse-engineering method using hypothetical findings as a way to test the utility of each proposed survey question. For each draft question, we asked: What sentence, chart, or conclusion would this enable us to write in the final report? If the draft question didn’t do the heavy-lifting we needed it to, we refined it. This approach ensured that each item helped us address the audit objective and led to clean, usable outputs.

My role was guiding the audit team through the survey design process and to review the proposed survey. Once finalised, the audit team managed execution of the survey across all 79 councils. The results played a central role in the audit’s analysis and reporting. For details of the audit’s findings, see the full report.