AI in Schools
Vic teachers pause strikes, UQ chancellor pushes back on TEQSA
The day's pattern is regulators and governments getting their interventions tested in public. The Victorian government's pay offer just bought a two-week pause in classroom strikes, the UQ chancellor publicly told TEQSA to back off, and the teen social media ban has hit its six-month mark with most teenagers ignoring it.
Victorian teachers have paused rolling strikes for two weeks of intensive talks
The AEU Victorian Branch Executive resolved over the weekend to suspend rolling stop-work action for a fortnight, citing "strong progress" toward an in-principle agreement. The non-strike industrial bans remain in place — no answering departmental email, no written report comments, no school visits from state Labor MPs. Branch president Justin Mullaly's framing was that the union has secured the principle of "closing the percentage gap between Victorian wages and those of public education workers in NSW in 2026, with further strong increases in subsequent years." The government's offer of 28 per cent over four years still sits below the union's 35-per-cent-over-three demand.
Why this matters: Yesterday's edition opened with rolling regional stoppages starting that morning. They are now suspended for the next fortnight while negotiators work. Operationally that is good news for principals planning Term 2 — but the bans on email and report comments, which do most of the quiet damage, are the part that has not paused. SBMs and principals should not relax records-keeping or substitute-supervision contingency planning yet, because if these talks fail at week two the rolling strikes resume from a more militant base. EducationHQ coverage.
UQ Chancellor Peter Varghese has gone public against TEQSA's ANU intervention
UQ Chancellor Peter Varghese published a piece on the university's news site on 30 April arguing that TEQSA's role in choosing ANU's next chancellor is "a dangerous precedent" and "part of a disturbing pattern of intrusions into the autonomy of universities." His position: "regulatory overreach weakens public institutions. It is wrong in principle and corrosive in practice." He grants that ANU's governance failures invited intervention but argues the cure threatens every council in the country, and that selecting the chair of a university council "should be the exclusive prerogative of that council" without regulatory influence.
Why this matters: Last week's brief covered the TEQSA-ANU undertaking as a precedent the sector now has to live with. This week the most senior chancellor outside ANU has put the counter-argument on the public record — and it matters that he did it personally rather than leaving it to Universities Australia. The pushback signals that any future TEQSA undertaking on a different university will land in a much more contested public space. For council members, the operational read is that defending governance integrity now requires demonstrably exceeding the standard of care TEQSA might otherwise impose — Varghese's piece is implicitly an argument that good governance is the only insurance against worse regulation. Peter Varghese on UQ News.
The teen social media ban is six months in, and most teenagers are still on social media
Crikey's Cam Wilson reported on 1 May that polling shared by the UK-based Molly Rose Foundation found 60 per cent of Australian 12-to-15-year-olds remain active on social media despite the ban that took effect on 10 December 2025. A separate survey of 14- and 15-year-olds covered by the ban found only 27 per cent are complying. The federal government has, in the last few weeks, made what Wilson calls "a seismic conceptual change" to the policy in response to widespread circumvention. eSafety has investigations open into Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube, with enforcement decisions expected by mid-2026.
Why this matters: For schools, the ban was always going to be a parent-relationship problem rather than an enforcement problem — schools were never deputised to police it. The compliance numbers now make the parent conversation explicit. For digital citizenship leads, the lesson is the one school librarians have been making for a decade: a policy that delegates enforcement entirely to the platform leaves the educator with no leverage at all. The eSafety decision in the middle of this year is the next inflection point — until then, the ban is operating largely on social pressure that the data says is not holding. Crikey: Australia is fixing its teen social media ban on the fly.
New research argues teacher resilience is structural, not personal
Karen Peel and four co-authors published an analysis on EduResearch Matters yesterday drawing on interviews with 42 Australian primary and secondary teachers. The argument: the teacher-success literature has framed resilience as an individual virtue, when the data shows it is a context-specific bundle of value-driven, agentic, adaptable, and relational strategies that depend heavily on the school environment. Teachers in their study described balancing "policy imperatives and classroom realities without surrendering their professional judgement." A key finding the authors emphasise: "what works" in one context may not succeed elsewhere.
Why this matters: This sits exactly across the AERO debate about evidence-based practice. AERO's "what works" framing is built on the idea that effective approaches generalise across contexts; this research argues the opposite — that teacher effectiveness is constituted by reading and adapting to context. For school leaders running PD programs, the practical implication is that buying a packaged "what works" program off the shelf will routinely under-perform structured peer observation and contextual coaching, even when the packaged program is cheaper per teacher. With the AERO governance review due to report this month, the timing of this argument is not accidental. EduResearch Matters analysis.
The 2026-27 federal budget lands one week from today
Treasurer Jim Chalmers will deliver the budget at 7.30pm AEST on Tuesday 12 May. For education-sector watchers, the items already on the public record to confirm: the next tranche of demand-driven Needs-based Funding for low-SES, First Nations, and regional students at universities (already running since 1 January); the Structural Adjustment Fund opening 1 July; ATEC's first year operating with statutory powers, including 2027 Managed Growth allocations; and the post-Better and Fairer Schools Agreement school-funding profile through 2034. The Victorian state budget on 27 May has the $222.2 million VCAA top-up and the Free TAFE expansion already locked in.
Why this matters: A week is a useful planning window. School business managers and pro-vice-chancellors should be checking which 2026 commitments their forward plans depend on, and which would be unwound if the federal numbers disappoint. The two areas to watch are international-education revenue assumptions in the Mid-Year forecast and any new envelope for the proposed Teaching and Learning Commission, which is still in working-group phase. Federal Budget 2026-27 portal for the schedule.
From Digital Attitudes: a three-minute diagnostic for where your operational load is actually building up
The piece published on Sunday introduces a free twelve-question diagnostic covering data, workflows, reporting and continuity. It returns the area in the worst shape and the first move worth making. The argument the diagnostic is built around: every school knows it is overloaded, and almost no school has a clean read on where the overload actually concentrates. The reporting cycle and the continuity plan tend to be the two areas where the load-bearing work is hidden, and they are not the areas leadership teams nominate when asked. Try the diagnostic.
The week's first read: a paused strike, a chancellor on the record, a policy quietly being rewritten, and a piece of research arguing the simple intervention is the wrong intervention. The thread is the limits of top-down levers — and the middle distance where principals, councils, and parents actually do the work. More on the operational landscape at digitalattitudes.com.au.