Department of Education | Joe McLachlan

Context

An opportunity to uplift a critical paper-based system

Every school term, teachers across New South Wales are tasked with completing their Performance and Development Plan (PDP), a paper document that asks teachers to create goals and reflect on their performance through the year.

Collaborating with principals, teachers, and support staff, myself and the team at Future Friendly designed the Digital PDP platform; a streamlined, modernised way for teachers to track their career growth.

Problem

A powerful tool obscured by administrative burden

PDPs are a powerful tool to guide teachers towards realising their full potential, but their implementation left teachers feeling unnecessarily stressed. Teachers worried about completing them in what little spare time they already had, forgetting their progress throughout the year, and losing track of the paperwork.

For school principals, the fragmented nature of paper forms meant there was no source of truth, with information easily being lost and staff needed to re-enter information manually.

These unnecessary administrative burdens detracted from the PDPs original purpose: helping teacher focus on their personal development.

Process

Co-designing a better experience from the ground up

We set out to answer a simple question: How can we leverage the power of digital to build a tool that solves these problems and enables the best educational outcomes for teachers and children alike?

Our process was simple: talk to teachers, principals and administrators to not only understand the current state of the PDP, but to co-design a new way to track personal development goals.

Over four weeks we conducted 16 testing sessions; interviewing 10 school teachers and 6 school supervisors and principals, to validate hypothesis-driven prototypes.

Solution

Less time on paperwork, more time engaging with students

The digital PDP tool is designed to empower teachers to create, manage, and track their professional development plans easily and quickly.

Serving as the single source of truth across various stages of the PDP cycle, it eliminates the need for disparate documents, facilitates ongoing career development, and enables teachers to spend more time teaching.

Efficiently create and manage richer PDPs

With the redesigned digital form, teachers were able to create more structured and informed goals.
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Rather than a large open text field like in the paper form, we broke down the goal creation into sections, and allowed users to align their goals directly with the NSW Teaching Standards, upload evidence of achieving those goals (such as pictures or other documents) and allowed them to capture thoughts or ideas within the PDP, rather than scribbling on the back of a paper form

Manage your team's PDP progress with a dedicated workspace

With the workspace view, supervisors can manage and monitor their team’s PDP progress through the school term, saving time spent chasing people up for progress updates. For supervisors, the introduction of a glanceable to-do list streamlined the decision making and knew which staff members they needed to support to complete their PDPs.
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Filtering by specific PDP progress or employment type and a staff search functionality made it easy for supervisors to stay on top of their team’s progress.

Evidence-based decision making through a comprehensive dashboard

The dashboard view allowed principals to make informed decisions about career progression to identify opportunities for their staff.

A timeline view allowed teachers and principals to track deadlines and due dates, while in-depth data visualisation allowed principals to track progress across their entire school, making data-driven decisions on how to best support their school or team.A new way to oversee an entire school’s progress and individual PDPs.

"This lets you spend more time on quality conversations, less time tracking down pieces of paper.

It gives you more time to meet the needs of the kids in your classroom."

— School Principal, testing participant

Impact

16,000 digital PDPs created in just 6 months

After wrapping up our project, we continued to work with the Department of Education on a build phase of this initial work. Since completing that project and launching the Digital PDP platform, over 16,000 digital PDPs were created within 6 months in NSW, surpassing initial goals set by the department and validating the tool's value. Ultimately for teachers, the tool allowed them to spend more time doing what they love — focussing on their students, not on the paperwork.

For principals and administration staff, the Digital PDP has significantly reduced administrative burden, freeing support staff to focus on guiding teachers on their career progression.

Finally, for the Department as a whole, the transition from paper to digital PDPs means that there is now access to powerful data that can be translated to insights that drive more effective policy outcomes across NSW.