Catholic Schools New South Wales (CSNSW) partnered with Folk and PreviousNext to create a powerful, award-winning digital platform that serves their diverse educational community through innovative design and robust technical solutions.
What began as distinct partnerships evolved into one consolidated delivery team, combining Folk's strategic, design, and project management expertise with PreviousNext's technical capabilities to create a powerful digital platform serving CSNSW's diverse educational community.
Partnership between suppliers
Folk led the project as CSNSW's primary partner, managing project coordination, testing, quality assurance, content production, and handover. PreviousNext collaborated closely with Folk's team, providing technical leadership and Drupal expertise.
This integrated approach ensured seamless delivery across all project aspects, from strategy and design to technical implementation and content migration.
Unified Digital Ecosystem
We transformed CSNSW's fragmented digital landscape by implementing a comprehensive design system with Folk. Built with Storybook and integrated via Pinto, this system ensures consistency across all digital touchpoints while maintaining flexibility for future growth.
The design system is the foundation for a scalable network of integrated platforms with components that can be easily shared and maintained across multiple sites.
Premium brand experience
To elevate CSNSW's digital presence, we developed a powerful content management solution centred around a UX-focused Layout Builder implementation.
Content editors can now create sophisticated, on-brand experiences through:
- Custom CKEditor 5 widgets that leverage the design system within body fields
- Consolidated layout options that maintain brand consistency while offering flexibility
- Dashboard-style pages that provide a unified approach to content presentation
- An interactive Find a School tool that showcases CSNSW's educational offerings across the entire state
Streamlining business processes
We eliminated manual workarounds and outdated systems by implementing the following:
- A streamlined content management workflow using Layout Builder
- Dynamic contact forms with intelligent routing capabilities
- Eventbrite integration for event management
- Custom Symfony/console commands for simplified site building
- Automated testing suites, including snapshot, accessibility, and visual regression tests
- Strong type-safety through string-backed Enums to eliminate common errors
- School import from the API process for the school finder tool
Self-Serve Information Hub
To transform the site into a one-stop shop for CSNSW information and resources, we delivered:
- Sophisticated search functionality with protected content capabilities
- Integration with Auth0 and NETiD for secure authentication
- A powerful Find a School tool integrated with CSNSW APIs
- Dynamic contact forms that efficiently route enquiries
- Performance optimisations include:
- Critical CSS inlining
- Lazy-loading for non-critical JavaScript
- Cascade layers for better style management
- Fluid responsive typography
Stable, secure and scalable infrastructure
To underpin CSNSW's digital transformation, we implemented our enterprise Drupal hosting platform, Skpr.
This modern cloud infrastructure delivers:
- High-availability infrastructure with 99.95% guaranteed uptime
- Real-time autoscaling capabilities to handle traffic fluctuations
- 24/7 monitoring and support from PreviousNext's Australian managed services team
- Australian data sovereignty and security compliance
- Seamless scalability for future functionality, horizons and integrations
- Cost-effective enterprise hosting solution
Built on Amazon Web Services, Skpr ensures CSNSW's platform remains responsive and reliable while maintaining the highest security and performance standards.
The results
The new CSNSW platform has successfully delivered on all transformation goals, creating a unified digital ecosystem that effectively serves its community.
The fragmented systems have been replaced with a cohesive, scalable platform reflecting CSNSW's premium education provider position.
PreviousNext played a crucial role in helping CSNSW achieve its ambitious project goals by delivering a sustainable, scalable, and high-quality solution on time and within budget.
Their expertise and meticulous approach were evident throughout the project. Leveraging their extensive experience with Drupal and robust development techniques, they ensured the solution was built right the first time.
A key focus was minimising post-implementation support through smart integration with existing data sources and other COTS-hosted processes and their APIs. Where appropriate, PreviousNext implemented tools to empower CSNSW to self-maintain the platform. This approach allows CSNSW to engage PreviousNext in higher-value continuous improvements to the communications platform post-project.
Joseph Watson - Director of Public Affairs
The platform sets new standards for educational websites, combining robust security with exceptional user experience and content management capabilities.
As Catholic education continues to evolve, this platform provides CSNSW with the tools and flexibility to meet future challenges while maintaining its position as a trusted education provider.
The Catholic Schools NSW website project won Best in Show at the DrupalSouth Splash Awards, Melbourne 2025.
Back to topCatholic Schools New South Wales play a vital role in Australia's education landscape. Before we began this project, they faced significant challenges with their digital ecosystem: a fragmented collection of websites that didn't reflect their values, outdated systems requiring manual workarounds, and difficulties for users accessing information and completing transactions.
CSNSW envisioned transforming this landscape into a unified, scalable website that would position them as a trusted, premium service provider backed by automated workflows and functioning as a self-serve hub for their community.
The challenge was clear: How could we create a flexible, secure, and high-performing platform that would serve diverse user needs while empowering content editors with intuitive tools?
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
