NSW Department of Education schools' web facelift driving enrolments

The NSW Department of Education says there are early indications that its website modernisation program is driving higher enrolment rates at public schools sporting its new designs and serving better digital content.

The department’s CIO Charlie Sukkar told iTnews that the state’s 2219 public school websites had been neglected for eight years until late 2024.

However, early in 2025 NSW started giving the sites a facelift by moving them into a newer cloud-based content management system.

The new content management system offers more advanced publishing capabilities such as the ability to drag-and-drop pictures and videos and accelerates the web publishing process.

Sukkar said that the 1600 sites that had been through the upgrade were more parent and guardian friendly than those that hadn’t.

Preliminary results, he told iTnews, showed that parents were more interested in what schools with newer sites were offering than those yet to be migrated to the new content management system.

The greater interest, he said, appeared to convert to increased enrolments in schools that have the new websites.

“By keeping our content relevant, we become more relevant to parents. We’re already seeing a correlation between – although green shoots [at this stage] – an uptick in enrolment and the refreshed websites for each school,” he said.

The department first started hosting its public schools’ sites in 2017 using an on-premises version Adobe's web content management platform.

However, over the next eight years the sites fell fallow, Sukkar said.

“Unfortunately, we implemented the [on-premises version of Adobe Experience Manager] and we didn’t invest in any further updates or upgrades," Sukkar said.

"Sadly, every single website remained stagnant for a very long time. We made some customisations to improve authoring and content creation, but nothing like what we’ve now been able to do partnering with Adobe now," he lamented.

The department had been chasing an ambition to increase student enrolments across all grades and saw that it needed to meet parents and caregivers “where they naturally habituate online,” Sukkar said.

Sukkar declined to reveal the department's expected final cost for the migration project.

However, he confirmed to iTnews that the average cost of migrating each school’s website was around $2000, suggesting the program’s overall budget will be topping out at around $4.4 million.

The department started planning the website upgrades in late 2024. It launched a pilot program across five schools with different educational settings the following March. The pilot program, Sukkar said, was critical the project’s success.

“Historically we haven’t been good at delivery. We haven’t been good at being able to deliver projects on time, on budget and within quality [expectations],” he said.

Ensuring that the rollout would work across schools with different educational settings was a major challenge, Sukkar explained. The pilot attempted to overcome the problem by gauging challenges that the department might encounter with the migration when applied it across differing locations and educational tiers.

The pilot grew to 25 schools and since then, Sukkar said, the website migration program had grown to 1600 schools.

Sukkar said that the department had also started to gather time and efficiency gains from the transition project.

The new cloud-based platform makes it easier for staff to create and manage content, which in turn lets them use methods that make it easier for parents and guardians to access information.

“That’s been a game changer ... a high point in terms of being able to win hearts and minds and get the momentum within our schools,” he said.

Drag-and-drop features of the new content management platform had also markedly accelerated the pace of site updates, saving staff up to 90 minutes per week, Sukkar said.