Prep pack for the Melbourne co-design session with Autism CRC

01Service requirements inventory

Nine services to design and deliver across 1 July 2026 – 30 June 2029

All nine services from Schedule 1 of the RFT, with their audiences, required delivery modes, embedded co-design expectations, and headline KPIs. Services 1–5 are the participant-facing offer; Services 6–8 are the platform, engagement and assurance layer; Service 9 is on-call.

Cross-cutting requirements that shape co-design

• Requirement 5 — Co-design method. The RFT specifies that, where co-design is required, the supplier must adhere to the principles and follow the guidance of the People with Disability Australia (PWDA) Co-Design Programming Overview. This is the named methodology in the contract.
• Lived experience throughout. Content and delivery must incorporate lived experience and the perspectives of the autism community across all services, not only Services 4 and 5.
• Student voice. Explicitly named in Service 3 ("options for a student voice, where appropriate") within the whole-school community model. No equivalent named hook in Services 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 — worth deciding whether to embed it more widely.
• Department approval. All training materials, online resources, website content and promotional content must be approved by the department prior to publication or use.
• Phase 4 inheritance. Existing Phase 4 materials will be handed over and must be reviewed, refreshed, replaced or built on — co-design starts from a body of existing content, not a blank slate.

02Program / session catalogue

The actual things that need to be designed

Pulled out of the RFT and grouped by modality so the room can see, in one place, the surface area of what has to be co-designed. Durations are indicative — the RFT names some formats explicitly (multi-day, virtual classroom, short topic) but leaves length to the tenderer; 90-minute topic sessions are flagged here as a likely default for the online topic offer.

Face-to-face

Online — live

Online — self-paced and mixed

Information & learning resources (Service 6C)

What the catalogue tells us about the co-design surface area

• Five distinct audience streams — educators, parents/carers, whole-school communities, First Nations, CALD — each with their own variant of most formats.
• Three layers of intensity — long-form comprehensive workshops, mid-form 90-minute sessions, short-form modules and resources.
• One platform spine — Service 6 — that has to integrate with all of the above, on a fixed deadline.
• Two ongoing community structures — educator CoP and parent / carer networking forum — that need their own co-design and moderation model.

03Co-design inputs needed

Whose voice we need, and where it lands

A first-pass map of the participation expectations the RFT places on Phase 5. The aim here is not to assign people to roles — that's part of what Cheryl's process will do — but to make visible the range of voices that need to be embedded, and where each one matters most.

Layers of input — a working distinction

• Direction — voices that shape what gets designed in the first place. Lived experience advisors, First Nations and CALD community representatives, education authorities. Most leverage when engaged earliest.
• Co-creation — voices in the room while content is being made. Autistic educators, parents, students (where appropriate), allied health.
• Validation — voices that test what's been made. UCD testing for Service 6, user acceptance testing, pilot delivery.
• Continuous — voices that keep informing change after launch. Service 7B forums, the educator CoP, Service 8 surveys, ad-hoc participant feedback.

04Draft workshop flow

A possible shape for the Melbourne session

A lightweight running order for the in-room session, designed to defer to Cheryl's facilitation while making sure the working surface area gets covered. Times are indicative; the spine matters more than the clock.

1. Open · ~15 min · Cheryl-led Welcome, framing, and Cheryl's co-design approach Cheryl sets the method for the session and the broader phase. The PP team listens before pitching anything.
2. Orient · ~20 min Walk through the service inventory and program catalogue PP / Autism CRC together skim §1 and §2 of this scaffold, just to anchor shared understanding of the surface area. Not a debate.
3. Map · ~30 min Where does co-design land hardest? Group identifies the 3–4 services where co-design has the highest stakes (likely 3, 4, 5, 6 — but let the room decide). These get the deeper attention; the others are flagged for later workstreams.
4. Voice · ~30 min Whose voice, where, in what role Walk through §3. Treat the four layers (direction / co-creation / validation / continuous) as a working frame — not a deliverable. The student-voice question is worth surfacing here explicitly.
5. Frame · ~30 min · Cheryl-led Sketch a working co-design framework Cheryl drives — using whatever method she's bringing, informed by what's been mapped. Outcome: a shared rough framework, even if it's still a sketch.
6. Position · ~20 min Autism CRC's role in Phase 5 Where does Autism CRC sit relative to the Service 7B forums? Are they an advisor, a research partner, a delivery partner, or a hybrid? This needs an explicit answer or an explicit "we'll resolve it by date X".
7. Close · ~15 min Decisions, parking lot, owners, dates Capture: what was decided, what's parked for next session, who owns what, and the next 2–3 milestones. Send the page back out updated within 48 hrs.

05Slide outline

A small visual deck for projecting at the start

Five slides, designed to be shown only if the room wants something at the front. Click Enter presenter mode in the side bar to step through them full-screen; arrow keys / Esc to navigate and exit.

06Open questions for Cheryl

Worth asking before the meeting, so the room starts ahead

Things to raise in the pre-meeting so the team isn't dependent on Cheryl bringing all the structure. None of these displace her process — they just make sure the day uses the room well.

1. What co-design method are you bringing into the room? The RFT names the PWDA Co-Design Programming Overview as the contractual anchor under Requirement 5. Knowing whether Cheryl is using PWDA as-is, an adaptation, or a different framework that she'll map to PWDA tells us how the day's work translates into the QMP later.
2. Where do you want lived-experience advisors in the room vs. consulted out of session? Sets expectations for how Melbourne itself models the co-design we're trying to design. Also clarifies whether the room is "PP + Autism CRC" planning, or "PP + Autism CRC + lived experience" co-creating.
3. How do you see Autism CRC's role across Phase 5? Are they a research source we cite, an advisory partner that sits alongside Service 7B forums, or a delivery contributor on specific services? Different answers imply different governance, different IP arrangements, and different framing for this Melbourne meeting itself.
4. How do you want student voice to operate? The RFT names it only in Service 3, but the spirit of co-design points wider. A position before Melbourne avoids the room re-litigating it under time pressure.
5. What cadence of co-design milestones do you envisage across the three years? Phase 1 transition runs Jan–Jun 2026; service delivery starts 1 Jul 2026; full website by 31 Dec 2026. The co-design rhythm needs to fit those gates. A rough sketch from Cheryl saves the room from improvising one.
6. Where do you want the PP team holding a pen, vs. holding the space? Avoids the trap where PP staff drift into co-designing on behalf of the people we should be co-designing with. Also tells the team how to behave in the room.
7. What's a "good outcome" for the Melbourne session in your view? Gives the team a single shared definition of done so the day doesn't become open-ended. Pairs with §4's "decisions, parking lot, owners" close.

07Evaluation framework considerations

What we need to bake in now so ACER can evaluate it later

The independent evaluation of Phase 5 will be commissioned by the Department of Education and is likely to be run by an external research body such as ACER. Service 8 is the supplier's own data and continuous-improvement infrastructure; the independent evaluation sits over the top of it. The decisions we make in co-design — what we measure, who we ask, how we capture lived experience, what counts as success — directly determine whether the program is evaluable when the time comes.

Considerations the framework needs to cover

What this means for the Melbourne conversation

• Co-design the logic model alongside the services. The conversation about what good looks like is the same conversation in both directions. If the room agrees on outcomes, the evaluation framework is half written.
• Decide measurement at the same time as design. Each service should leave Melbourne with at least a draft answer to "what would tell us this is working?" — even if the instruments come later.
• Bring lived experience into evaluation design, not just service design. Otherwise the people the program is for don't get a say in what success means for them.
• Map who holds what. Supplier owns delivery data and continuous improvement. Department commissions and owns the independent evaluation. ACER (or whoever) brings methodological independence. Autism CRC's role here is part of §6's open questions.
• Build for evaluability from MVP. Service 6's MVP on 1 July 2026 is the practical deadline for whether registration, consent capture, and data linkage are designed-in or bolted-on.

Working questions to flag for the department and ACER

1. Will ACER (or another body) be commissioned for the full term, or for milestone-based evaluation moments? Determines whether evaluation is continuous and embedded, or summative and periodic. The data architecture is different in each case.
2. Is there a Phase 4 evaluation report we should be designing continuity from? If Phase 4 outcomes were measured a certain way, repeating those measures gives a longitudinal story. Diverging deliberately is fine — diverging accidentally is wasted information.
3. What outcome statements does the department most want to be able to make at the end of Phase 5? Working backwards from the desired statement defines the data you need to collect. Saves the team from over-collecting and from under-collecting in equal measure.
4. How will First Nations data sovereignty be operationalised in the evaluation? Affects what data is collected, who holds it, who consents on whose behalf, and how findings about First Nations participants are reported. Best resolved with ACCO partners early.
5. Where does the supplier's continuous improvement reporting end and the independent evaluation begin? Avoids duplication and avoids gaps. Service 8 is the supplier's instrument; the independent evaluation is the department's. The handshake between the two is the point worth defining.