When the system doesn’t reflect real life

The Enrolment Registration Number (ERN) system is used by NSW public schools to manage student enrolments and records. It plays an important role in the administration of public education, but over time the needs of schools and families have become more complex than the system was originally designed to support.

School Administrators deal with a wide range of situations: shared custody, blended families, court orders, multiple caregivers and students moving between schools. These aren’t unusual edge cases. They’re part of everyday school administration.

Yet the systems schools rely on don’t always make these situations easy to manage.

As part of the ERN Uplift, I led research and design activities to better understand the challenges faced by School Administrators and identify opportunities to improve the experience.

Listening to the people doing the work

We spoke with School Administrators to understand how they managed enrolments and student records, where the systems helped, and where they got in the way.

The research revealed seven recurring themes:

1. System integration and data management: Information was spread across ERN, Sentral and other systems, creating duplication and manual reconciliation.
2. Complex family dynamics: Existing ways of representing parents and caregivers struggled to accommodate shared custody and different family arrangements.
3. Administrative burden: Staff relied on spreadsheets and manual workarounds to manage enrolments and follow up missing information.
4. Training and support: Staff wanted better guidance and more help getting the most out of existing systems.
5. Health and medical records: Information was difficult to manage across systems, particularly during the transition from primary to high school.
6. Community and socioeconomic factors: Schools supporting families with more complex circumstances often faced additional administrative work.
7. System changes and budget pressures: Frequent changes and reduced administrative support added to an already demanding workload.

These themes helped us move beyond a list of requested system improvements and understand the underlying problems.

Challenging the family tree

One finding stood out.

The traditional approach to representing family relationships was built around a hierarchy of parents, often labelled ‘Parent 1’ and ‘Parent 2’. It assumed a relatively straightforward family structure, with the school needing to understand who the parents were and how they related to each other.

But that’s not how every family works.

A student might have two households, shared custody arrangements, step-parents, grandparents or other caregivers involved in their education. Court orders can also affect who schools can communicate with and what information they can share.

Trying to fit all these situations into a fixed family hierarchy created unnecessary complexity for School Administrators and the systems supporting them.

The problem wasn’t that we needed more fields or more complicated rules. The underlying model was wrong.

Putting the student at the centre

We reframed the model around the student, rather than the family hierarchy.

Instead of treating the family as the primary structure and the student as someone within it, we made the student the centre of the model, with relationships to parents, caregivers and other relevant people represented from their perspective.

It was a relatively simple change in concept, but an important one.

It better reflected the way schools actually need to understand and manage relationships. It also provided a simpler foundation for the supporting system architecture, rather than trying to accommodate every possible family arrangement through increasingly complicated rules and exceptions.

Looking beyond the interface

The ERN research also highlighted broader opportunities to reduce administrative work, improve integration between systems and make enrolment processes easier to manage.

For me, the most important lesson was that improving a system doesn’t always mean adding functionality.

Sometimes the biggest improvement comes from questioning the assumptions on which the system was originally built.

By listening to School Administrators and understanding the realities of their work, we were able to challenge an outdated model and develop a simpler way of thinking about student and family relationships.

Better systems start with a better understanding of the people who use them.