A complex process behind a simple requirement

Every year, the NSW Department of Education needs to screen large numbers of people who work in, visit or provide services to public schools.

This includes contractors, cleaners and other workers who may not be employed directly by the department.

The purpose is straightforward: make sure the appropriate checks are completed before people are allowed to work in or visit school environments.

But the administrative process behind this requirement wasn’t always straightforward.

Different groups were involved in managing screening, with different systems, information requirements and processes to navigate. This created additional work for staff and made it harder to manage the process consistently.

The challenge was to make screening simpler without compromising the checks and controls needed to keep schools safe.

Bringing people and processes together

I worked collaboratively with Probity and Digital HR on the Centralised Screening initiative, also known as Digital Declarations.

The work involved understanding the needs of the different business areas responsible for screening, the people being screened, and the compliance requirements that needed to be maintained.

Rather than looking at screening as a collection of separate administrative tasks, we explored how the process could be brought together into a more consistent and straightforward experience.

This meant looking beyond the immediate forms and systems to understand the broader process: what information was needed, who needed to provide it, who was responsible for checking it, and how the process could be managed more efficiently.

Simpler processes, not more complexity

One of the important design considerations was finding the right balance between consistency and flexibility.

There were different types of people being screened and different business circumstances to accommodate. It would have been easy to keep adding exceptions and special cases, creating an increasingly complicated solution.

Instead, we focused on understanding the common needs and designing a more consistent approach around them.

The aim was to reduce unnecessary administration, make the process easier to follow and avoid adding complexity where it wasn’t needed.

Making compliance easier to manage

The work helped improve the way contractors and visitors were screened, reducing the administrative burden experienced by the teams responsible for managing the process.

It also reinforced an important principle: compliance and a good user experience don’t need to be competing priorities.

Often, the best way to improve compliance is to make the correct process easier to understand and follow.

When people know what information is required, why it’s needed and what happens next, there’s less opportunity for confusion, duplication and manual follow-up.

What I took away

Government processes often become complicated because they need to satisfy many different requirements, stakeholders and risk considerations.

Over time, that complexity can become embedded in the way people work, even when some of the steps no longer add much value.

The opportunity for service design is to step back, understand the real needs and constraints, and find a simpler way to achieve the same outcomes.

Centralised Screening was a good example of this: working across business areas to make an important compliance process easier to manage, while keeping its underlying purpose firmly in view.