What we know — and what we don't.

Our model is built on principles the research supports. That's a fair thing to say. It's not the same as saying we've proven our results — and we won't blur the two.

ParkSyde brings counselling, community engagement, support work, and real paid work together under one roof, so a person can move between them without leaving the organisation. That design reflects what the evidence associates with good outcomes: person-centred and co-designed support, lived experience, cultural safety, and meaningful work as an anchor for connection and routine.

The honest ledger

Being well-designed isn't the same as being proven. We'd rather say so than let you assume otherwise.

How we're closing the gap

The honest answer to "where's your evidence?" is that we're building it. Here's the plan, at our size:

1. Choose measures with people, not for themA small set of validated, co-designed measures — wellbeing, social participation, goal attainment.
2. Baseline and follow upA simple picture at intake, repeated over time, so real change is visible.
3. Keep the stories with the numbersConsented client and staff accounts alongside the data, so it keeps its human meaning.
4. Report what we findHow much did we do, how well did we do it, is anyone better off — including where the answer is unclear.

When that first cycle is done, we'll publish what it shows. If it's mixed, we'll say so. That's the only kind of evidence worth having.

What we got wrong

The ledger above is about what the evidence supports. This one is about us. We keep it because an organisation that only publishes its wins has published an advertisement, and because the mistakes worth reading are the ones that might make you think differently of us.

1. 9 August 2026 — our games page promised “no coins, no passes, no unlocks”, and the biggest game on it has all three Our arcade page told people there was “nothing to buy — no coins, no passes, no unlocks”. What we meant was that nothing costs money, and that was true and is still true: no ads, no accounts, no payment screen anywhere in any of these games, and not a single request to anybody else's server. What we wrote was wider than what we meant. The basketball game has Coins you earn, kit priced at 400 to 800 of them, an “unlocked and equipped” message, and a fifteen-tier season Pass — free, one track, but a Pass. A parent who read that line and then opened the game would have found us wrong, and would have been right. We thought about deleting the coins instead of the sentence, and decided against it for a reason worth stating: those coins are what the game pays a child for doing an arithmetic question, or a real chore signed off by a grown-up. They pay for effort. The thing we took out of these games a fortnight earlier was the button that paid children for simply opening the app, and “free coins” became “earn coins” at the same time. Removing what rewards effort would have been walking the wrong way. So the sentence was the thing that was wrong, and the sentence is what changed — said here rather than quietly reworded, because a promise withdrawn in silence is worth less than the one it replaced. Found by reading our own games against our own page, not by a complaint.
2. 9 August 2026 — a story in our basketball game used the word “Lifeline” to mean that nobody came Our basketball career game has an honest scene about burnout, and we are keeping it. One branch of it was wrong in a way we would not want anybody to meet. If a player chose to consider dropping out, the game decided whether anyone reached out to them based on choices they had made in unrelated scenes up to three years of game-time earlier. A player who had answered a family scene differently was told, at the lowest point in the story, “No lifeline answered. You're standing at the edge” — and the only control on the screen was a Continue button. Three things wrong with that. Lifeline is the name of the crisis service that very page dials, 13 11 14, in a pill in the corner of the same screen, and we had it meaning “nobody came”. “Standing at the edge” is ledge imagery on the one screen in everything we publish that shows a person in a suicidal crisis. And whether the game offered any comfort at all was a reward for having played well earlier. Fixed on 9 August 2026. The scene stays, and so does the honest part — pushing through alone still ends in a shutdown, because it does. But the beat now carries Lifeline 13 11 14 in its own words, as a number you can press, from the moment it opens and on every branch of it, depending on nothing. Somebody happening to ring you is still something the story can take away. A number that answers is not, and never will be again.
3. August 2026 — twenty-one of our pages had no crisis number you could ring, and our own check said they all did Our first rule is that anybody reading any page of ours is one tap from Lifeline. Twenty-one of our forty-nine public pages were not. Eight carried no crisis number in any form, and seven of those eight were the games — the pages most likely to have a child or a struggling teenager on them at two in the morning. Ten more printed the numbers as plain text you would have to retype while distressed. Three lost them entirely if JavaScript did not load. What makes this worth reading is not the count. It is that we had written an automated check for exactly this rule, and it had been reporting all-clear for months. It scanned a hand-written list of files that never looked inside a folder, so all six of our game directories were invisible to it. It matched the digits as a piece of text, which an ordinary sentence satisfies. And it excused any page that merely mentioned the file our phone numbers live in. Three faults, each enough on its own, and together they meant the rule we were proudest of was the one we had quietly stopped testing. Every page now carries all three numbers as real dialled links whether scripts run or not, the smallest crisis tap target went from 15 pixels to 36, and the check was rewritten and then deliberately run against the broken site and watched to fail before we trusted it again. In the games the numbers sit above every pause screen and game-over panel on purpose: nothing in a game may be the thing between a child and help.
4. August 2026 — we told guests who cannot see our park three things that were not true Nine of our ten district pages described a chimney with smoke coming out of it — "the hearth is lit and somebody is home" — for buildings that have no chimney. Only the counselling cottage has one. That sentence was not decoration: it was in the description a screen reader announces, and in the text shown when JavaScript is off, so it was said only to the people who could not check it against the picture. Separately, the spoken walk around the park announced eleven shopfronts and then said "that was the last of the twelve", so a guest who cannot see it could be told the walk had finished with a district still unvisited. And our NDIS page went on listing "a table you can pull up to" after we removed that table from the room for standing in the way of the accessible counter. Three different faults, all landing on the same person, and none of them visible to anybody who could simply look. All three are fixed, and the words a screen reader hears are now generated from the same data that builds the picture, so they cannot drift apart again. We would rather say this plainly than let it read as a rounding error: the guests who depend most on our words were the ones our words were worst for.
5. August 2026 — the links to everything we give away free were invisible At the foot of five of our pages sits one line pointing at the four things ParkSyde gives away for nothing: the games, the Fairpaddock, and what things cost. Those four links were being drawn in a colour almost exactly the same as the dark background behind them — a contrast ratio of 1.08, where 4.5 is the minimum for readable text. Hovering made it worse rather than better. On thirteen other pages the main button in our menu had the same kind of fault and measured 2.63. On one page a link came out at 1.00, which is to say it was the background. None of it looked broken. It looked slightly dim, which is how it survived months of us reading our own pages. We found it by measuring instead of looking, and that is the lesson we are keeping — because on the same pass, one automated contrast check confidently returned a healthy 11.6 for a panel that a screenshot then showed was being painted straight onto a moving sky. A good number from the wrong measurement is worse than no number at all. All of it is corrected, and the free things are white on their background now.
6. August 2026 — we corrected an NDIS overclaim, overshot, and then denied a service we really do provide Two mistakes, one on top of the other, and the second one is the worse of them. First, our NDIS clearing said we offered "support work, coordination and the everyday help that makes a plan work", and called us "plan-friendly". That described a registered NDIS provider, and we are not one. So we rewrote it — and the rewrite said we had "never delivered NDIS support work or support coordination". That sentence was false, and we are withdrawing it. ParkSyde does provide support work. A line about not being an NDIS service was read as a line about not doing the work, and the denial went into nine files in a single day. Most were put right within hours. This page was not, so the page we keep precisely so that we cannot get this wrong went on telling NDIS participants we had never done support work at all — and it is the page a careful person reads before deciding whether to trust us. Our own fees page was charging for the thing this page said we had never done. We are withdrawing the sentence in the open rather than editing it away, because somebody may have read it and concluded we were not the place for them, and because a mistakes page that tidies its own mistakes is not one. What is true is what the NDIS clearing says: ParkSyde provides support work and counselling, and is not registered with the NDIS — and does not need to be for the way we work. We support people who manage their own NDIS funding or have it managed for them by a plan manager. Whether your own plan can be used that way is a question for your plan manager or the NDIA rather than for us, and we will be straight with you either way. Of everything on this list this is the one we like least, because we got the same subject wrong in both directions inside one day. The lesson we are keeping is that "we don't do that" is exactly as large a claim about ourselves as "we do", and it needs exactly as much checking.
7. August 2026 — our privacy page told people we weren't storing something we were When we replaced twenty-one "ask us" buttons with forms that file directly to us — the fix recorded further down this list — our privacy page did not follow. It went on saying that a form "opens your own email app" and "doesn't transmit or store your details on this website". That had been true. It stopped being true the day the forms started working, and it stayed on the page afterwards. Nobody's information was exposed and nothing was shared: enquiries go into our own database, which only ParkSyde team members who need to answer you can read. But of all the pages to be out of date, the privacy page is the one where being out of date is itself the problem — it is the page people read precisely because they want to know what happens to what they type. Corrected, along with the line underneath calling this a static site with nothing stored. Found by reading our own pages against our own ledger, not by a complaint.
8. August 2026 — two of our pages disagreed about whether the school was open We had two home-education pages. The older one said "the full online school is now open"; the live one says enrolments open in Term 4, that joining the waitlist costs nothing, and that nothing is charged until a family chooses to start. Both were reachable, and the page making the stronger claim was the one a visitor reached from the Home-school door in our park — while we were running a fortnight whose whole premise is a waitlist for something not open yet. A family could have clicked that door, read "now open", and felt misled the moment they reached the real page. We did not correct the older page, we retired it: two pages describing one offer will always drift apart, so now there is one, and an automated check compares the price on every page that states it. It came back, and we are saying so here rather than quietly fixing it twice. On 10 August 2026 the Home-school door in the park was found chipped “Now live” while the page behind it still said enrolments open in Term 4 and the platform is invitation-only. Same door, same direction, same optimism — in a three-word chip, which is the smallest piece of copy on a page and the one nobody re-reads. The check we added last time compares prices, and a chip has no price in it, so nothing caught it. The chip now says what the page behind it says. What this taught us is narrower than the first lesson and worth writing down: retiring the duplicate page fixed the duplicate page, and did nothing about the habit of the door being more confident than the room.
9. August 2026 — our own front door showed an old version of the park For weeks the park was being built in one file while the website served an older copy of it. Visitors — including our own owner — saw work that was months behind what existed, and a second opinion that told us so was right when we assumed it was a caching problem. Fixed the same day: the front door now serves the real park, and the duplicate was retired so there is only one to keep.
10. August 2026 — eight service pages had no crisis numbers on them Our counselling page carried Lifeline, 13YARN and 000. Its eight sister pages — cleaning, grounds, courses, NDIS, pathways, sport, the store, home-school — never got the same block, so a person reading one of those had no path to help from that page. Every public page now carries them, and a check that runs on every change now fails if any page loses them again.
11. August 2026 — we published two different prices for the same term Our home-education sales page offered Term 4 as $100 + $100 + $119, while our fees page, our flyer and our community page all said $270 for the term or $100 a month. Our own rule is that the published price wins, so the sales page now offers what everything else promises — the cheaper of the two, so no family was charged the difference. The same automated check now compares every page that states the price.
12. August 2026 — our request buttons opened a mail app instead of reaching us Twenty-one "ask us" buttons across the site — the curriculum map, ten service enquiries, bookings — opened the visitor's email program rather than sending anything. On a phone, inside Facebook's browser, that often goes nowhere. Every one is now a form that files directly to us. The same audit found that bookings through one of our pages had been arriving with no name attached.
13. August 2026 — we asked search engines not to list us, then wondered why Twenty pages, including the front door, carried an instruction telling search engines to ignore them — left over from when the site was deliberately quiet. We opened the site publicly without removing it. Cleared everywhere except the pages that genuinely should not be indexed.

Nothing above was found by a complaint. Each came out of checking our own work, which is the only reason we can publish it this plainly. If you find something we have missed, tell us and it goes on this list with your finding credited if you want it to be.