The NSW Department of Education oversees 2,200+ public schools across the state and almost 150,000 teaching and support staff. Schools across the state struggled with an overly complex policy environment that created unnecessary administrative work and confusion:

• The policy landscape consisted of 361 separate documents supporting 201 different policies, creating an overwhelming web of instructions for school staff.
• Over 70% of school operational tasks were directly tied to policy requirements.
• Teachers were spending valuable teaching time on administrative tasks.

The Department recognised that untangling this policy complexity was essential to fulfilling the NSW Government's 2023 commitment: to give teachers back five hours each week by reducing their administrative workload.

From March to December 2023, CEC partnered with the Department to establish a human-centred approach to policy redesign.

Before starting any policy redesign, we engaged with schools to understand their current pain points and ways of working. This established a school-centred foundation for restructuring policies to align with how school staff actually work.

We then delivered our work in three key phases:

1. Testing the Method with a Pilot Program

We started with Work Health and Safety policies – one of the most complex policy areas. This pilot:

• Established proof of concept for our human-centred design methodology.
• Created templates for future redesign work.
• Validated our approach through rigorous testing with schools.

The Work Health and Safety pilot successfully consolidated multiple overlapping policies and reduced supporting materials from approximately 20 documents to just 8.

2. Scaling Through a Structured Program

Next, we needed to determine how to scale the pilot across all operational policy areas. We approached this systematically:

• We documented the current policy landscape to identify duplication and dependencies between policies.
• Based on this analysis, we prioritised policy areas according to complexity, urgency, stakeholder readiness and political importance.
• We created a detailed roadmap with seven concurrent workstreams that accounted for stakeholder capacity, policy dependencies and ideal consolidations.
• We developed detailed work plans and comprehensive tools, including engagement templates and mapping toolkits, to ensure consistency across workstreams.

The roadmap, work plans, templates and tools established a robust program approach centred on the human-centred design methodology.

3. Reimagining the Policy Library Experience

Alongside policy consolidation, we supported the Department to reimagine the Policy Library user experience.

The Policy Library needed to be a ‘single source of truth’ for staff to access policy and associated supporting documents. We focused on making the policy library easier for school staff to use. To do this, we:

• Conducted research with school staff to understand their needs.
• Delivered functionality improvement recommendations for the Policy Library.
• Created a digital design guide with indicative wireframes that promoted consistency in format and framing across policy documents.
• Embedded the recommendations into the Department’s design system.

The redesigned policies were released in stages from March 2024. This program has delivered significant improvements to the Department’s policy environment:

• Halved the number of policy documents, from 361 to 180 (and counting).
• Aligned policies with how school staff actually work.
• Identified, consolidated and streamlined overlapping and conflicting procedures and guidelines.
• Improved information findability through consistent structure.

Most importantly, these improvements give teachers time back to focus on teaching. 

Our work with the NSW Department of Education demonstrates how human-centred design principles can transform complex policy environments. By putting users at the centre of policy design, organisations can reduce administrative burden while improving clarity and compliance.

For more information about the Policy and Procedure Review program, see the ‘Audit of teacher’s administrative tasks - Final report’.