Industry
Not-for-profit
Our role
Design, end-to-end delivery, operational monitoring & managed services.
Featuring
AWS
Summary
PwC Australia collaborated with Cerebral Palsy Alliance (CPA) to design and build the Step4Schools platform on AWS. PwC brought experience design, product thinking, engineering, operational monitoring and managed services and the latest AWS AI and security services to bring CPA's Step4Schools vision to life. Working as one team with CPA and AWS, PwC delivered a platform that allows schools to register themselves, gets children active, keeps students engaged through gamification, and gives CPA the room to grow the program without growing the work behind it.
Scaling Step4Schools: Growing its Impact
Cerebral Palsy Alliance (CPA) and Step4Schools
Cerebral Palsy Alliance is a global centre of expertise for cerebral palsy research, advocacy, intervention and assistive technology. Step4Schools is how that mission reaches Australian classrooms. It invites primary schools to join the Cerebral Palsy week challenge, where students get active, fundraise for early intervention of cerebral palsy, and learn what inclusion looks like in practice.
The challenge: an idea CPA needed to scale
Step4Schools had drawn strong interest from schools in its first two years, but four constraints were holding it back from growing to the scale CPA needed:
- Scaling Constraints: Acquiring schools had been a manual process for CPA
- Limited Interaction: The platform offered no activity tracking, engagement or reporting, leaving students disconnected from the program and its mission, and CPA without insight into the program's impact.
- Reliance on Participants: The set-up leaned too heavily on teachers to manually develop and record activities, causing hesitation to participate.
- Technology Infrastructure: The technology hadn’t been designed for a campaign with specific weekly peaks.
The approach: co-design with CPA, engineered on AWS
The approach: co-design with CPA
PwC helped Cerebral Palsy Alliance to design, architect and deploy the Step4Schools platform on AWS serverless technology. Beginning with a joint workshop alongside CPA and AWS, PwC collaborated on the ideal state, set the product direction and designed the user experience, while ensuring everything remained connected to CPA's mission of inclusivity. Running focus groups with teachers and students, PwC developed a framework of what would help schools register, drive student engagement and keep CPA's mission front and centre rather than hidden behind the fun.
PwC Capabilities
- Product Development & User Research
- Cloud Native Engineering
- Observability Centre of Excellence (Manila)
- Managed Services
Technology impact
Through the partnership with AWS, PwC leveraged the latest innovations in AI native development tools and serverless architecture to build a secure, efficient and cost effective Step4Schools platform.
The platform has been built on a fully serverless AWS Lambda foundation, allowing it to scale up for the thousands of students arriving at once during Step4Schools week, with no infrastructure for CPA's team to manage.
PwC also leveraged AWS's latest engineering and security capabilities, using Amazon Kiro AI assisted development tooling with human review in the loop across design, build, security and testing. With students using the platform, security was a day zero concern: AWS Frontier: Security Agent provided independent penetration testing, code review and design review, with every finding remediated before launch.
PwC then proved performance rather than assuming it, running 9 test scenarios and more than 7 million requests to simulate the real September peak of 3,000 concurrent users, plus an hour-long endurance test. With observability built into the platform, monitoring, logging and alerts are available to CPA to identify any issues as they arise.
Key services
- Amazon Kiro
- AWS Frontier: Security Agent
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon CloudWatch
Operational Monitoring and Managed Services
PwC supported the platform with operational monitoring and managed services across website health, user access, donations and security during the campaign in September. The team triaged alerts, investigated application and payment-journey issues, refined monitoring to reduce false positives, and tracked incidents through to closure. Regular reporting gave CPA visibility of service health, operational risks and campaign engagement, helping maintain a reliable platform while identifying opportunities to improve the participant experience.
Engineering Step4Schools on AWS
The impact: a program that can grow without growing its overhead
36 schools
2,363 activities
Goal to reach every school in the country
The result is a refreshed Step4Schools digital experience that makes it easier for schools to learn about the program, participate and sustain student engagement. The platforms interactive dashboard now allows schools to manage profiles and activities, set and monitor fundraising goals and track student participation. Gamification brings the experience to life: students can create an avatar, log daily activities, earn points and contribute towards a shared school goal. Importantly, Cerebral Palsy Alliance's message of awareness and inclusion is embedded throughout the experience.
In its first year, CPA welcomed 36 schools, who logged 2,363 activities during the week of Step4Schools, a significant step up. Though the outcome that matters most is not measured in technology. Every school that takes part is a few hundred more young people who understand cerebral palsy, and the funds they raise go to early intervention therapy and supports the families of those living with cerebral palsy.
