The Centre · Frameworks & Practice Tools
Frameworks & Practice Tools
Understanding experience. Informing practice. Improving systems.
CDERP's frameworks and tools have developed through research, professional practice and engagement with employment systems. Each addresses different questions and operates at different levels. Together, they contribute to understanding people's experiences, strengthening professional practice and examining the conditions that influence employment opportunities and outcomes.
About the frameworks
The tools underneath the work.
Over many years, CDERP has developed frameworks, assessment instruments and practical resources to help professionals and organisations better understand employment, strengthen their practice and examine the conditions that influence outcomes.
These resources have emerged from different questions, research projects and practical experiences. Some help us understand employment systems, others support professional judgement, examine service quality or capture the experiences of people participating in employment services.
They are not all parts of one methodology. Each has its own purpose, evidence base and appropriate application.
Together, they reflect CDERP's continuing commitment to connecting research with the realities of practice.
People and experience
Understanding individual aspirations, circumstances, strengths, relationships, environments and changing experiences.
Practice and evidence
Translating understanding into action, examining what happens, gathering evidence and continuously improving professional practice.
Systems and conditions
Examining the organisational, institutional, policy and commissioning arrangements that influence employment opportunities and outcomes.
Foundations
Intellectual foundations and continuing inquiry
Two frameworks have shaped much of CDERP's thinking about employment. They have distinct purposes: one offers a systems perspective, the other a functional one.
A systems perspective on employment, including the relationships and conditions influencing opportunities and outcomes.
Treats employment as an ecosystem of six interdependent domains operating across four system levels, and holds that durable outcomes arise from alignment between those domains rather than from intervention in any one of them. First articulated in 2018 and extended into its current six-domain form in Labour and Industry, 2026.
A functional perspective on how employment systems organise, coordinate and govern the activities necessary to support employment participation.
Establishes the conditions under which integrative, relational work becomes governable inside transactional systems, so that practice depending on time and professional judgement can survive funding and reporting arrangements built for throughput. Applied in national model development and in the design of provider operating models.
ESME and IEFF are foundational intellectual contributions. They are not compulsory organising structures for every subsequent CDERP instrument, and the tools that follow were developed in response to their own questions.
The research portfolio remains open to new evidence, conceptual development and findings that may extend, modify or challenge earlier work.
Frameworks, instruments & resources
Frameworks, instruments and practice tools.
Each is a distinct contribution with its own purpose, audience and application. Several operate across more than one of the dimensions above.
Resource descriptions are provisional and under review for technical accuracy.
Professional Practice and Counselling
A clinical-grade counselling framework for fragile employment journeys, the spine of the Employment Counsellor Program.
Builds employment counselling on three interdependent domains: presence, the disciplined relational stance that makes a person safe enough to speak honestly; inquiry, the structured exploration of vocational identity, values and conditions; and engagement, the sustained work of turning that into negotiated, durable employment.
Aligned to PACFA professional standards, and the basis of the Centre’s Employment Counsellor Program.
Derived from PIE-CF. Establishes the environmental, sensory, relational and cognitive conditions under which a person can actually work, mapped across seven domains and revisited as employment progresses.
Not a diagnostic instrument: it is a structured way for counsellor and participant to interpret lived experience together, so that workplace adjustment is designed from evidence rather than assumption.
A method for working with families as active participants in Discovery and transition.
A structured approach to working with families and support networks as participants in the employment process rather than observers of it. Grounded in the finding that families routinely act as integrators across fragmented service systems, and absorb the consequences when those systems fail to align.
Quality Assurance and Fidelity
The broader organisational quality assurance framework, incorporating fidelity alongside other quality conditions and evidence.
Shifts organisational attention from compliance toward reflective practice, workforce development and continuous improvement, so that effective practice does not depend on individual champions. Developed in customised employment, applied across employment service delivery.
The Customised Employment Fidelity Assessment (CEFA) provides a structured, evidence-informed approach to examining how faithfully an organisation implements Customised Employment.
CEFA recognises that fidelity is not demonstrated simply by adopting a particular methodology, delivering training or completing prescribed activities. It must be evident in how an organisation supports practice, how practitioners engage with individuals and employers, and how the essential principles of Customised Employment are maintained throughout service delivery.
The Second Edition strengthens this organisational perspective, drawing on documentary evidence, practitioner and organisational interviews, and observations of practice to examine the consistency between stated intentions and actual delivery.
Using a seven-point fidelity rating scale, CEFA supports independent assessment, identification of strengths and areas requiring improvement, and ongoing organisational learning.
CEFA also provides the fidelity assessment component of the Customised Employment Quality Assurance Framework (CEQAF), while remaining a distinct assessment instrument.
Purpose: To establish whether Customised Employment is being implemented with demonstrable fidelity and to identify opportunities for organisational improvement.
Practice Evidence and Reflection
Most quality systems ask whether a service did what it said it would. These two scales, DERS and FERS, ask whether the people on the receiving end experienced it that way. Read alongside CEFA, and alongside the practitioner fidelity instruments already established in the field, they complete the picture: what the organisation did, what the practitioner did, and what the person and their family actually experienced.
Participant, family and Discovery measures that turn practice into a defensible evidence base, the data behind fidelity claims.
Captures the participant’s own account of Discovery across five domains, from relational engagement through to clarity of outcomes. Where other instruments establish whether Discovery was delivered as designed, DERS establishes whether the person experienced it that way. A smiley-scale version is the default, so that the instrument is usable by the people it is about.
The family counterpart to DERS. Twenty-four items covering respect and dignity, safety in raising concerns, whether the family’s knowledge of the person is used in planning, the clarity of information and of the path ahead, and the practical load the process places on the household.
The structured record that carries a person through Discovery and into sustained work: home and community observation, family and friend interviews, pathway visits, vocational theme development, the job development plan, and the post-placement support and fading plan.
It is explicitly not an assessment, and cannot be used to exclude a person from an employment outcome or to prescribe one. In use well beyond the Centre, adopted by employment providers and social enterprises across several states, in most cases under their own branding.
Employment Outcomes and Progress
Assesses employer engagement as a relational capability rather than an activity count, across five domains running from reach and relationship depth through to system influence. Scored to the same maturity levels as CEQAF, so that engagement is judged as part of organisational quality rather than as a separate function.
The problem they answer
Why a suite, not a method.
Most employment frameworks describe what good practice looks like. The harder problem is that good practice does not survive contact with the system it sits in. Funding models, caseload pressure, reporting requirements and workforce turnover all pull practice back toward whatever the system actually rewards.
The Centre’s instruments are built around that problem. Some describe the practice. Some measure whether it is holding. Some are used to design the conditions that let it hold at all. Used together, they make it possible to see where a system is losing the thing it says it wants.
Fidelity is not a claim a provider makes. It is a condition that can be audited, evidenced, and lost.
In delivery
How the instruments are used.
Taught, not described
The College's programs are built on these instruments. Practitioners do not learn a philosophy and then improvise. They learn the tools and how to apply them under real conditions.
Diagnosis before redesign
When the Centre works with a provider, the instruments do the diagnostic work first: what is designed, what is delivered, and where the gap sits. Change work follows the evidence rather than the assumption.
Designing the conditions
At model and policy level the frameworks are used to design conditions rather than to assess performance. That is a different task, and it needs different tools.
On access
The instruments come with the reasoning.
The frameworks are not published as downloadable documents, and that is a judgement about use rather than commercial caution. An instrument applied without the reasoning behind it produces confident numbers and no insight, which is worse than not measuring at all.
What is available is application: licensing with implementation support, adaptation for a particular system or jurisdiction, or a briefing on how a given instrument works and what it would tell you about your own delivery.
- Licensing with implementation support
- Adaptation for a system or jurisdiction
- Audit delivered by the Centre
- Briefing on a single instrument
- Training through CDERP College
Work with the Centre
Find out what your delivery actually looks like.
Whether you are considering an audit, licensing an instrument, or want to understand what one of these tools would tell you, start the conversation.