Case Studies: Social Services

Making student loans work

ISSUE
Studylink was established to provide loans for students in order to support government policy of increasing access for students to tertiary education. Its mandate was to act as a banker, and it was given no discretion around entitlement. Studylink overcame its teething problems and established effective processes as banker.

A consequence of government policy was a sharp increase in the number of students attending courses, and hence in the number and volume of student loans; this increase was not accompanied by an equivalent increase in overall educational achievement. Studylink asked Synergia to work with them to develop a new service design aimed at ensuring that students wishing to take out loans understood fully the consequences of their borrowing at all stages in their career, and the impact of success and failure on their debt.

SOLUTION
This work proceeded under demanding deadlines and involved working at a number of levels:

- With the management team and relevant others undertaking the conceptual design of such a system

- Taking a systems perspective to articulate the outcomes hierarchy, the intervention logic and new system design flow model

- Working with a Studylink Design Team to identify the target populations and design the core delivery systems.

OUTCOME
The outcome of the assignment was a design at both conceptual and operational level of a system able to deliver what was required of it.
A major benefit of this work was the involvement of Studylink personnel in taking an avowedly systemic approach to the design. This platform allowed the design team to use systems thinking tools to storyboard the processes and clearly and precisely set out the purposes and expected outcomes of the systems and related subsystems. The result was a very clear set of requirements able to be articulated to the IT designers who would build the underlying technology.