Department for Education brings digital literacy to student programs
DfE launched a student engagement platform on Salesforce that gives the team the tools they need to document student info, make it actionable in real-time, & work as one via five program-specific apps.
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:
- Make data actionable with respect to spotting patterns, informing resource planning, and delivering trusted support
- Manage cases that might involve detailed nuances, relay input from an array of stakeholders, or require a personalised approach from one case to the next
- Enable staff to focus more time and energy on mission critical work vs. the clerical work that often comes with it
- Work as one team across departments, organisations, and functions.
“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 NEEDED A HOLISTIC STRATEGY TO SUPPORT CHILDHOOD EDUCATION NEEDS
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:
- Referrals for a specific program, resource requirements/capacity planning
- How long the wait list for that program might be
- Support systems that are driving better engagement or helping that student progress
- How that information stays intact should a student transfer from one school to another
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.
DfE BUILDS ITS TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM AROUND A HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN
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 centered approach, where technology is built around the people,” said Warner. “We were always thinking about human centered 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 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.
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.
Results + impacts = an increasingly robust architecture
“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:
- 1.2 M student, staff, parent/guardian records integrated from master data sources
- 25 K Consultations with schools in support of student outcomes
- 12 K referrals for one on one support with a child/student
- 173 active flows executing business automation
- 774 K flow executions per month
- 21 different case types
- 500 active logins per month from external portal users
- 4 system integrations with an average of 60 K upserts daily
- Auto-managed provisioning of 27 K users via OKTA
“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.”
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