AI in Schools
Melbourne names Evans VC, Victorian teacher strikes start
Two leadership stories at the top of the country and two industrial-action stories underneath. The week opens with the people picture sharpening at the same time the workforce one is fraying.
Carolyn Evans is the next Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne announced on 28 April that Professor Carolyn Evans will be its 22nd Vice-Chancellor, commencing 5 October. Evans is Vice-Chancellor of Griffith University and chairs Universities Australia. She returns to Parkville after almost two decades at Melbourne earlier in her career, including eight years on the University Executive. She succeeds Interim Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis. Evans will stay at Griffith through the end of August before moving south.
Why this matters: The appointment closes the leadership uncertainty that opened when Duncan Maskell stepped down in 2024. Evans inherits a balance sheet under pressure, an international-student pipeline reshaped by Managed Growth, and a sector watching ATEC ramp up its statutory powers. Her chairmanship of Universities Australia gives her unusual visibility into the federal-state-regulator triangle she now has to actually run a university through. Pro-vice-chancellors and deans planning beyond Term 3 should expect a real strategy refresh rather than continuity drift. University of Melbourne announcement via Medianet and Griffith University statement.
Victorian public-school teachers start rolling half-day strikes today
The Australian Education Union's Victorian branch began region-by-region half-day stoppages this morning, the first of an escalating series of actions endorsed by members on 10 April. Schools in different parts of the state will rotate through morning or afternoon strikes over coming weeks, with afternoon rallies at local Labor MPs' offices following each action. The escalation comes after the AEU rejected the government's recent 28-per-cent-over-four-years offer, which yesterday's edition covered. Reports, written feedback, new government initiatives, departmental email, and some meetings are all on member-imposed bans.
Why this matters: Today's action moves the dispute out of the negotiation room and into school operations. Principals will be running attendance, supervision, and parent communications around partial-day disruptions for an indefinite period — and the most operationally damaging element is the bans on reports and new initiatives, which will quietly reshape Term 2 even at schools where strike days are infrequent. SBMs need a written posture on what work the school will and will not pause, because "wait and see" is itself a position once families start asking. Victorian Teacher Strike Dates 2026 timeline.
UTS staff held a 24-hour strike from Thursday to Friday
The NTEU branch at the University of Technology Sydney walked off at 11am on 30 April, returning to work at 11am on 1 May. The action followed management tabling its final bargaining clauses without a pay offer after six months of negotiations and concurrent cuts to equity-student access programs. UTS staff have now had multiple rounds of stoppages dating to March. Sydney University, Newcastle, and Federation members have been on parallel campaigns. The University of Melbourne professional staff have lodged a four-day-week claim alongside a 20-per-cent pay demand.
Why this matters: The school dispute in Victoria and the university disputes across NSW and Victoria are running on different industrial frameworks but the underlying picture is the same — staff convinced wage offers are not compensating for workload growth, and management arguing the funding envelope can't stretch. For higher-ed planners, the operational risk is concentrated in semester two assessment delivery if disputes drag into July. The governance question, particularly visible at UTS, is whether the council and the executive are speaking with one voice when the NSW inquiry is already asking pointed questions about consultant spend and council process. Green Left coverage of the parallel disputes.
University of Queensland built a single incident playbook — and it's not just for cyber
Director of Cyber Security David Stockdale told iTnews on 4 May that UQ has spent the last twelve months consolidating incident response across cyber, legal, communications, and other operational functions into a single coordinated approach, supported by tabletop exercises and a single-vendor security stack on Palo Alto Networks. The framework draws on Security of Critical Infrastructure Act discipline but extends to non-cyber incidents. The forensics capability is now used to support university legal units when matters require investigation.
Why this matters: This is what mature university IT leadership looks like in 2026 — incident response treated as an organisational capability, not a security-team-owns-it function. For other universities running rotating CISO appointments and patchwork tooling, the gap is widening. For school sector CIOs and SBMs, the playbook is portable: most schools already have cyber, legal, and parent-communication response paths but rarely a single rehearsed framework that joins them. The lesson is the rehearsal, not the spend. iTnews coverage.
Campus Review makes the agentic-AI argument for universities
A 29 April commentary in Campus Review argued the next student-experience leap is agentic AI — systems that can retrieve information, trigger workflows, and make bounded, auditable decisions in real time, rather than just generating text. The piece flagged La Trobe's appointment of the sector's first AI Pro Vice-Chancellor (Phil Laufenberg, March 2026) as the institutional shape of where this is going. The framing positions universities to move beyond defending against AI use and into operationally embedding it.
Why this matters: Agentic AI is the term universities will hear pushed hard by vendors over the rest of 2026, and the procurement risk is real — "agent" easily becomes a wrapper around the same generative tools, with new audit gaps. The "bounded and auditable" part is the test for any university considering an agentic deployment in advising, enrolment, or assessment workflows. Pro-vice-chancellors who cannot answer "what decision did the agent make and why" before signing should not be signing. Campus Review piece.
The shape of the day is leadership solidifying at one end of the system and breaking down at the other. A new Vice-Chancellor at Australia's largest university, a rolling industrial dispute across Victorian schools, and parallel staff campaigns across half a dozen universities. The operationally interesting question is which of these stabilises first. More on the workforce and governance landscape at digitalattitudes.com.au.