Marine Estate Agents Program banner

Marine Estate Agents Program

Client: NSW Marine Estate (NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development) 
Sector: Government / Environmental Education 
Services: Curriculum Mapping, Content Research & Writing, Graphic Design & Branding, Illustration, Photography, Pilot Coordination & Teacher Feedback, Web Accessibility Compliance

Overview

PeeKdesigns was engaged by the NSW Marine Estate to develop a statewide primary school education program in support of the NSW Marine Estate Management Strategy. The result, the Marine Estate Agents Program, gives teachers everything they need to introduce students to the marine estate and turn them into “agents of change” for looking after it.

Tailored for Years 1–6 (Stages 1–3), the program aligns with the NSW syllabus subjects Human Society and its Environment (Geography) and Science, and addresses cross-curriculum priorities including Sustainability and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultures and Histories.

The Challenge

The NSW Marine Estate Management Strategy sets out nine initiatives for protecting and enhancing community benefits from the marine estate — but strategy documents don’t translate directly into classroom learning. NSW Marine Estate needed a resource that could:

  • Meet all nine initiatives of the Marine Estate Management Strategy in an education context
  • Engage a broad age range, from early primary through to upper primary (Stages 1–3)
  • Be genuinely fun for students, not just curriculum-compliant
  • Cover a wide span of topics — ecosystems, living things, fishing and boating, traditional use, climate change, and marine careers — in a way that felt cohesive rather than disjointed
  • Be tested with real teachers and refined before statewide rollout
  • Meet NSW Government web accessibility requirements across every PDF and PowerPoint deliverable, ensuring the resources were usable by people with disability and compliant with government publishing standards

The Solution

PeeKdesigns led the program from the ground up, handling:

  • Curriculum mapping — aligning content to Human Society and its Environment, Science, and relevant cross-curriculum priorities across Stages 1–3
  • Content research, writing and editing — developing all educational content from scratch
  • Graphic design — creating the Marine Estate Agents Program’s branding, illustrations and interactive materials
  • Photography — sourcing original imagery to support the program
  • Pilot coordination — running a pilot program with teachers and incorporating their feedback into the final resources
  • Web accessibility compliance — ensuring every PDF and PowerPoint resource met web accessibility (WCAG) requirements, in line with standard practice for NSW Government publications

The finished program includes teachers’ guides and student activity books for Stages 1–3, a set of background topic fact sheets (covering climate change, marine ecosystems, fishing and boating, the marine estate itself, and traditional use), a suite of classroom presentations (from fish identification to marine estate careers), and career-focused fact sheets and videos introducing students to real jobs in the marine estate — from fisheries managers to dive instructors and marine research scientists.

For younger students, PeeKdesigns also built a standalone interactive resource, Can I live here? (see below), adding a playful, screen-based learning option alongside the printed materials.

Outcome

The Marine Estate Agents Program is now hosted on the NSW Marine Estate’s own website as its core primary schools education offering, giving teachers across NSW direct access to a full suite of curriculum-aligned guides, activity books, fact sheets, presentations and career resources. The program’s structure — teacher guide, activity book, and topic-based presentations built around a shared “agents of change” concept — gives schools a consistent, ready-to-run pathway for marine estate education from Year 1 through to Year 6, while the built-in pilot and teacher feedback process helped ensure the final resources genuinely worked in the classroom before wider release.

Teacher’s Resources

Here’s one of the additional interactive resources created for the younger students.