eDUCATE NSW

Team Name

Team SwitchCase

Team Members

Project Description

NSW is one the best places in Australia to raise a family. However, it is also one of the most expensive places with childcare expenses, educational expenses, transport expenses etc.
Fortunately, government provides many services and rebates for parents to support one of their life’s most important journey – educating their kids.
This portal maps the important milestones and available government services available at any stage of a kid’s educational journey to provide a better experience to NSW Parents.
• It uses age as a timeline.

• Parents can go to the portal and based on their children’s age find out the important events such as school admission, opportunity classes etc applicable to their child and the different government services available for that stage.
• The links either direct parents to the relevant portal (e.g. transport website to apply subsidised travel) or eligibility tests (e.g. creative kids voucher). These eligibility tests are based on the rules as a code developed using NSW OpenFisca.
The current portal is a Proof of concept based on a limited user research and addresses only one pain point i.e. single view of government services related to education.
• Desktop research – NSW Department of Education website, Service NSW website, Australian Department of Human Services website, FaCS Website, Transport for NSW Website
• Limited Customer research – we spoke to 2 sets of parents with school going kids.
Parents A – with 1 kid Aged 5.5 years
• Have used Active kids as informed by the sports class
• Not used Creative kids as not aware of the scheme even though kid goes to dance class
• Not used StEPS screening as not aware of the program
• Biggest painpoint – No Single Source of Info
Parents B – with 1 kid Aged 6.5 years
• Have used Active kids as informed by friends who have used this rebate
• Have used Creative kids as as informed by friends who have used this rebate
• Have used StEPS screening as informed by childcare
• Biggest painpoint – Time wastage due to exploring multiple sources of information at different stages of kid’s life. Hence reply on friends rather than proactively searching.

We hope to test this portal with more parents and government agencies to learn what major life events have we missed and produce the next iteration of the portal.

Future:
Parents focus
1. Create focus groups of diverse parents to cover various scenarios such as (but not limited to)
o kids at different age stage
o kids with special needs
o kids with special abilities
o kids with different language and cultural background
2. Run design thinking workshops to understand the pain points of parents in the education journey of their children
3. Develop this portal further to address those pain points
4. Test and iterate
Government departments
1. Partner with relevant government agencies to explore the pain points and solutions
2. Develop further rules as code for the various services (such as Transport subsidy for kids etc) on the portal.

Data Story

This is a PoC for what a service covering the Education within a raising a family life journey would look like.
For the PoC we have used the School finder app which is based on the school location open data from NSW Department of Education data portal. For future development we can use other open data to provide better insights to parents.
We have also used creative kids and active kids voucher eligibility test form (http://test.nsw.digital/active-kids.html ) and developed another form for StEPs eligibility using the rules developed in OpenFisca.