The Centre · Events
Two gatherings a year
Small rooms, difficult questions.
The Centre convenes twice a year. Neither gathering is large, and neither is trying to be. One is open and one is closed, but both work on the assumption that forty people who can act on an answer are worth more than four hundred who cannot.
The Customised Employment Conference
An annual symposium for people working in and around Customised Employment and employment services more broadly. Deliberately capped at around fifty, because the format depends on everyone in the room being able to speak.
Two years in, the conference has covered the technical ground, how the practice actually works, and the delivery ground, how providers are putting it into effect. The practice itself is now reasonably settled. The questions that are not settled sit one level up.
Good practice, poor outcomes.
The starting position is not that providers are underperforming. It is that systems produce the performance they are designed to produce, and that a great deal of capability is currently being spent on absorbing that design rather than on outcomes. With NDIS employment in flux and Inclusive Employment Australia still settling, the question of how a method survives the model it is funded under is no longer theoretical. The Centre's research on this is the basis of the day. The point of the room is to work out what follows.
The technical year. Practice mechanics, Discovery, fidelity and the instruments underneath high-fidelity delivery.
The delivery year. Providers presenting how the practice is being put into effect, and what it costs them to hold it. Guide Dogs Victoria, Kew.
The CE Practitioners' Retreat
A closed, two-day working retreat for the people carrying and developing Customised Employment practice.
Now in its eighth year, the Retreat brings together CE associates, ACRE-accredited practitioners, academics and service providers. It is not a conference and not professional development. It is a small room for sharing what people are seeing, working through difficult practice, testing new ideas and tools, and fixing the gaps that remain.
Where are we now, and where do we go next?
Inclusive Employment Australia is settling in, the NDIS employment environment is changing, and CE practice continues to develop.
This year we will compare what people are experiencing under IEA and NDIS, introduce and put the updated CE tools to work, tackle difficult practice questions, and explore practical approaches to career progression and the use of AI in everyday work.
Day two turns to the problems we have identified and asks what we can actually do about them.
Two days. Eight good conversations.
Why the Centre convenes
Both rooms come out of the same work.
The conference and the retreat exist because the Centre does research and trains practitioners, not the other way around. What gets argued about in April tends to show up in the following year's programs.
Join the room
Register interest, or ask what it is really about.
Conference places are limited and released to those who have registered interest first. Retreat attendance is by invitation.