Funding education for the children of injured veterans

Since 1919, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs has managed a series of education schemes providing support in funding and services to students from primary school to university age where a parent is permanently disabled or killed while in service. The scheme is recognised as inefficient and manual and needed transformation.

Our Principal Designer was part of a multidisciplinary and a multi-agency team undertaking a Discovery project to review and transform student support. We undertook ethnographic research with parents, carers and students accessing the scheme to understand needs and barriers to access as well as factors relating to equity and social isolation.

Analysis of our research lead to service and stakeholder maps, personas, and hypotheses for a future Alpha phase to design and prototype changes to services, business model, and culture.