Department of Education – Helping Schools be Ready for Students

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  • 2022

  • Digital
    Web Design and Development

Designed By:

  • Michael Forbes - Future Friendly
  • Ben Hanley - Future Friendly
  • Amanda Morkos - Future Friendly
  • Thom Vincent - Future Friendly
  • Jon Christensen - Future Friendly

Commissioned By:

DOE - Gillian White; Chris Yu

Rick Salter; Kate Stevens ; Prashant Kumar; Linda Bray; Jacqui Ryan

Emma Purcell; Nicole France; Ashantth Indrapalan; Vanessa Fookes; Vanessa Kutcher;

Karen Lopez; Meenakshi Sharma, Hemanth Thudimella; Nilay Saraiya; Nishant Kaushik

Mukul Madian, Rohee Jain; Van Le, Hugh Twomey, Peter Buckmaster

Designed In:

Australia

Almost 100,000 students start kindergarten in NSW each year. The Transition to School Statement provides a snapshot of each child. It helps link the Early Learning Framework to kindergarten, by assessing the child’s readiness to transition to school, which better enables a teacher to develop a child learning plan.


  • CHALLENGE
  • SOLUTION
  • IMPACT
  • MORE

  • Previously the transition to school statement was a paper-based service that provides information to teachers from early childhood educators. An unknown number of paper-based forms were making it from early childhood educators to primary school teachers. The team’s brief was to build a digital experience to increase the uptake and quality of the information provided to teachers so that they could create a safe and welcoming environment for students.

  • We built the transition statement as a digital service that enables communication and information sharing between early childhood educators, parents and teachers. With greater verification and access to accurate data, the new digital transition statement means teachers can use the system to better support children in the classroom. Since December, the limited release pilot program has had over 5000 completed digital statements.

  • Through researching with 120+ users we found that teachers valued behavioural and social insights on children. We designed the product to provide them with the most valuable info, which helps teachers to prepare the right support network for children starting school. Research shows that teachers are busy, overworked and stressed. The product was designed to fit into their lives - as teachers are likely to complete the form in multiple sessions, the product allows them to save and exit their progress with ease and confidence.

  • The new digital service has opened the doors to analytics to help gain a better insight into how many forms have been completed, delivered and read. It helps parents and early childhood educators know where it is going, and this uptake in delivery will help the primary school teachers develop a plan for each student, ensuring the school's readiness to accept students. As the forms are not mandatory to fill out - the department can focus further on adoption through utility and analytics which means that more students will get a form each year.