The Department of Education delivers world-class education services for Queenslanders at every stage of their personal and professional development. Through key portfolios – Early Childhood and Education – it strives to ensure that Queenslanders have the education they need to contribute to the economy.
Co-design of a Cultural Capability Framework for the 90,000+ strong workforce of Education Queensland
The Department of Education Queensland launched their Commitment Statement to Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples in 2019. The statement commits to the entire workforce to delivering aspirational, educational, and economic and social outcomes. It recognises that everyone has a role in ensuring cultural safety and aims to create workplaces that value, include and support Aboriginal employees and Torres Strait Islander employees.
Education Queensland wanted to bring their Statement to life, they engaged Everywhen to deliver a set of co-design workshops in multiple locations with a richly diverse cohort of participants including teachers, regional staff, corporate staff, principals, learning experts, policy and project management staff and representatives of the Queensland Teachers Union. Everywhen facilitated all workshops and enable Education Queensland to design a cultural capability framework that was aligned to the State Queensland RAP, Education Queensland’s Commitment Statement, and the Federal Government’s Cultural Capability Framework.
Everywhen led human centred design-thinking workshops to a diverse range of stakeholders
Everywhen embraced designers with users to deliver the best results for an enduring solution. Everywhen’s approach to design thinking embodies a process that drives creativity and innovation. We incorporate the rigour of the traditional analytical design approach, but keep the human (user/participant) at the heart of every step. We involve a variety of inputs and draw on diverse expertise, as well as use innovative techniques to bring the best information and ideas to the forefront. We challenge all assumptions and push ourselves to develop a highly relevant and insightful process.
We design together and put the human need first.
Everywhen utilised divergent and convergent thinking with multiple iterations to ensure only the strongest ideas survived
- Define the need – we conducted in-depth user experience sessions highlighted by principles of design thinking, business process improvement, storytelling, and Indigenous ways of thinking and learning – to truly understand the need of the user through a human centred design lens.
- Ideate – we ran ideation sessions highlighted by Brainstorms, ‘going wide’ with concepts and outcomes, generating ideas that inspired news ideas, and explored curious and creative activities to encourage innovation and expand the solution space.
- Design – we ran sprints using numerous human centred design principles and methodologies to design cultural capabilities, actions, and indicators to develop test and refine.
- Develop and customise – we created prototypes of frameworks to share, iterate and improve. After synthesising findings, we customised a framework that represented only the strongest ideas.
- Test – we developed an implementation roadmap that would validate the frameworks efficacy and sustainability.
Education Queensland now has a culturally safe and robust Cultural Capability Framework to guide decision making and bring their Commitment Statement to life
The new Framework will enable all 90,000+ members of its workforce to move along the learning continuum towards true allyship, working in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to design and develop innovative, culturally informed solutions for the future. The Cultural Capability Framework was designed to be evaluated, enabling people to measure their progress along their learning journey of becoming more culturally capable.
The Cultural Capability Framework has been designed to:
- Learn and apply Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing – build cultural capability by applying Indigenous ways to everyday challenges. Core capabilities like leadership and accountability can be applied through Indigenous ways and measured across a cultural capability learning continuum.
- Bring the Commitment Statement and RAP to life – a conceptual framework with core capabilities, performance descriptors, and continuum indicators that enable Indigenous perspectives and co-design lead the reconciliation process.
- Provide its 90,000+ workforce with a tangible tool to enable informed decision making – a practical tool that connects with teachers in the same way it does corporate staff and horticulture staff to inform the daily decision-making process that enables the delivery of aspirational, educational, economic, and social outcomes.