South Australia's Department for Education (DfE) delivers programs and services that set students up for success long-term. Most recently, that work has included a transformation effort that brought all information about a student together, developing a 360-degree view that serves as an example for any organisation looking to:
“I actually started working for the Education Department right when my son was in reception, so I got to see how the work we do is or isn’t relevant on the ground, through the eyes of his teachers and through my own eyes as a parent. You really have to find the balance between corporate KPIs and what educators need in order to support your children,” said Crystal Warner, Salesforce Capability Lead, Department for Education South Australia. “The work we are doing here is removing much of the administrative burden that we’re otherwise putting on teachers and staff so that they can put more into teaching.”
DfE set a goal to become one of the top 10 education departments globally by 2028. This meant the team needed a way to demonstrate the factors that make an organisation exceptional, such as supporting students with special needs. One of the Minister’s objectives for meeting the top-10 goal was to have autism and mental health programs available to students in every school across South Australia. In order to manage that, schools need a way to document and report on:
Preferably in real-time since questions on these sorts of topics can’t always wait for the end of the school year.
It was apparent that DfE needed more than a point solution to deliver these requirements. It needed a comprehensive digital strategy that would serve stakeholders now and into the future.
“But many education organisations don’t have much of a digital strategy at all,” said Warner. “Whether it’s because of funding limitations, the need to maintain equitable learning environments, or any number of other reasons, computers are not really in classrooms. That’s not the way teachers typically teach, which means they don’t have as many opportunities to develop digital literacy as a part of their professional experience. And this carries through their career progression; as someone moves from a classroom to a principal’s office to an administrative or corporate role, they bring pen, paper, and excel spreadsheets with them. They get stuck in a rut.”
A rut that DfE broke.
The team sat down with Salesforce Professional Services for a Phase 0 strategic planning exercise. Together, the team interviewed 19 directorates and 38 SMEs to understand their unique challenges and needs. They explored what operational assistance was needed in order to support the level of complexity and identified gaps. They asked questions like what does world class look like? and what do we need to get there? They turned findings into strategic plans that included digital workflows, triggered by actions taken in the student’s profile vs. department-specific processes or operations.
“This helped us gain an understanding of what our stakeholders were trying to achieve and what is valuable to them from a non-systematic perspective, which enabled us to architect solutions that actually deliver against those outcomes. A human centred approach, where technology is built around the people,” said Warner. “We were always thinking about human centred design fundamentally, but didn’t really understand it as a practical framework. The Phase 0 exercise helped us align business needs and IT functionality, and become a business improvement team with a technology backbone.”
The result of this exercise: a student engagement platform on Salesforce Customer 360 for Public Sector. It gives DfE the tools it needs to not only document student data and information, but also make it actionable in real-time through the following five program-specific apps:
Support 360, DfE's Flagship App
Support 360 was built for students with special needs. Program enrollment, progress notes, assigned aids or other staff, and more are all captured in a personalised profile record built on Education Cloud. This gives DfE the ability to see the complete picture surrounding that student, document updates, tag subject matter experts on specific questions, and initiate any asks or action items all from the same profile record. For example: if a routine health and wellness assessment reveals a new area of risk, staff can record the results, note the change in status, and log a case to request additional services they feel might help bring that student back to a state of equilibrium. No logging into additional systems, no manually uploading results, no emailing support requests required.
If a student transfers schools this profile travels with them, enabling the new staff to review historical details as they plan a warm welcome. No guesswork as to where a file might be or if the file even exists.
Sister-organisations involved in supporting the student — such as healthcare professionals who need to weigh in on a student’s care plan or members of the judicial system who might have updates on critical information — can also access the profile record and contribute their latest guidance, or click a button and generate the necessary case files. Permissions can be set on a per-user basis, giving the right people (and only the right people) access to the right information. Integrated reports and dashboards enable DfE to look at their student body holistically, spot trends, surface patterns, and pinpoint catalysts that might inform care plans or resource needs the following school year. “We can demonstrate where and how we are supporting students with additional needs. We can record what’s working, and use that to inform decisions and help more students succeed,” said Warner.
Customer Feedback App
If a parent or guardian has a comment or complaint, an online form built using Omnistudio guides them through the intake process in a step-by-step manner, and then categorises the resulting case as level 1 (general complaints), level 2 (requires involvement from the school), and so on. If the school requires support from DfE’s customer feedback unit in order to appropriately and accurately respond, they can raise a similar ticket in the same app, link it to the original case, and work as one team across school and corporate to resolve the issue. Telephony integration is underway, which will increase the app’s omni-channel capacity going forward.
International Services App
If an international student is coming to Australia to study, their applications paperwork are stored in a personalised profile record in Public Sector Solutions. This gives DfE a complete view of the student’s history, study-abroad requirements, upcoming deadlines, and more so that the team can help track and manage student progress. If a South Australian resident is interested in opening up their home to house international students, they can use the same app to apply for the home stay program. A similar Omnistudio form to the one in the Customer Feedback app is underway here as well, which will guide hosts through the application process, which then feeds into CPQ to generate pricing quotes and produce the necessary documentation, respectively. “Consolidating this on one platform is saving us upwards of $50,000 AUD a year,” said Warner.
Incident 360, built to last
Incident 360 allows staff to report any health or safety incidents that happen onsite through another Omnistudio guided form process, including workplace accidents, bullying, and more. “We wanted to understand how many incidents were happening, what types of incidents were happening, if there are any patterns regarding a repeat perpetrator or repeat victim, and action it with the school accordingly,” said Warner. “We have to move quickly and address these events proactively before they become bigger issues. Because we did all the work up front to understand the business capabilities needed, we can do things like repurpose Omnistudio for all our frontend experience flows in-house and get to market that much faster.”
Because we did all the work up front to understand the business capabilities needed, we can do things like repurpose Omnistudio for all our frontend experience flows in-house, and get to market that much faster.
Crystal WarnerSalesforce Capability Lead, Department for Education
These apps are accessible through various online community portals built on Experience Cloud, where users are invited to create a profile so that they can log back in to check the status of an inquiry, follow up on next steps, or browse additional information.
The team was also intentional about which Omnistudio forms require authentication and which ones were best left unauthenticated, meaning DfE administrators can serve up a personalised experience with information relevant to the role (a teacher will need different information than a speech pathologist, for example) upon log-in for authenticated apps. Unauthenticated apps enable DfE administrators to evaluate and report in aggregate without tracing details back to a specific individual when the app should remain anonymous. In other words: Warner and team built a combination that gives DfE a balancing point between privacy and personalisation.
Mulesoft was added, which enables the platform to connect with third-party systems. Shield was also layered on, giving DfE an additional layer of security.
Shield offers more than just security
Event monitoring, one of the capabilities available with Shield, allows Salesforce administrators to see when something out-of-the-ordinary happens, such as someone downloading a large number of data files all at once. And while this is typically used to flag potential data security risks, Warner and team are actually turning this into a business productivity opportunity as well.
“This was pinging so frequently that it could have easily been mistaken for the strobe light in my kids’ room. But it wasn’t people trying to misuse the data. It was people downloading data into an Excel spreadsheets because that’s what they are used to. Turns out most of the instances were school staff looking to track patterns in absenteeism. So we added that parameter into Salesforce, and now they can run a report on real-time data,” said Warner. “Those conversations wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t properly maintained our environment and had those security measures in place.”
Results + impacts = an increasingly robust architecture
Today, DfE’s student engagement platform supports roughly 30,000 users across the larger department, as well as 1,500 external users via the Customer Feedback app and International Services app. As new functionality is needed, the team (comprised of four system admins, one tester, three business analysts, one solution engineer, one program manager, and one project officer) is able to deliver between 20 and 40 new features every fortnight. This has helped further shape the platform, which is being used to support more aspects of student life and manage mission complexity:
Building out a strategic plan that can make sense of this type of complexity is just one of several best practices Warner and team demonstrate in this work — best practices that make a great starting point or to-do list for any digital transformation effort.
“People are building their own reports and dashboards to answer their own questions, and asking questions like ‘what’s next? and ’how do I do this?’ which lets us know the platform is getting traction, making an impact,” said Warner. “We’re also in the middle of securing GS21 compliance, which determines how long organisations need to keep files on record as well as when certain file types need to be destroyed. We put in a field that date-stamps these records and paired with a workflow that takes action automatically when a deadline comes up.”
The platform supports approximately:
“This is enabling staff to spend more time working on the things that students need in order to be successful instead of tasks like formatting spreadsheets so that data can be uploaded to a new location,” said Warner.
“Like I said, being a parent who just put their kids in school was a really insightful experience to understand just the nuances associated with teaching individuals based on their learning needs,“ said Warner. “With the right foundation, data, and best practices we can understand what students and their caregivers need to succeed, and then architect the technology to deliver supportive outcomes.”
