AI in Schools
Compass logs four outages, OAIC code closes in twelve days
The Monday read is three items on the operational calendar, and the first is the SIS most independent and Catholic schools log into on the bus into work this morning.
Compass logs four performance incidents in five days
Compass Education's public status feed and the third-party trackers that mirror it recorded four "identified performance issues" on the Compass platform across 17, 18, 20 and 22 May, with a further login authentication report from Australian users on the morning of 22 May. The longest single incident was a forty-four minute drop on the evening of 20 May, with users reporting portal inaccessibility and 500 server errors. None of the four hit the major-incident threshold and Compass has not made a customer-facing statement about a root cause for the cluster. Compass Education public status page, StatusGator history for Compass Education, and the IsDown record covering the 17 and 20 May incidents.
Why this matters: Compass is the K-12 SIS most independent and Catholic schools in Victoria depend on, and the platform whose schools-served number rose past 2,200 globally when the company picked up Clipboard's extracurricular base in January and the dust from the discontinued School Bytes review settled. Four routine incidents in five business days is not a breach and is not a crisis, but it is the quieter version of the platform concentration argument Binoy Kampmark put into The Mandarin last Monday. When one SIS underpins attendance, payments, parent comms and the morning bell roll for a state's independent sector, the day-to-day reliability bar moves up, and the operational fallback question (what does the front office actually do when the portal returns a 500) is one most schools have not rehearsed. The fortnight ahead is a good one to write that fallback procedure down.
Twelve days left on the OAIC Children's Online Privacy Code submissions
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner's consultation on the Exposure Draft of the Children's Online Privacy Code closes at end of business on Friday 5 June, twelve days from this morning. The Code applies to online services likely to be accessed by children, which covers most ed-tech the K-12 sector buys (LMSes, SIS dashboards exposed to students, AI tutoring tools, classroom-comms platforms, library systems), and the OAIC will register the final Code on 10 December alongside the broader Privacy Act amendments. As of the most recent OAIC update, more than 65 stakeholder engagements had been logged with industry, regulators and civil society. OAIC consultation page for industry, civil society and academia, and the Baker McKenzie analysis of what the draft Code changes for platforms.
Why this matters: For state Department of Education legal teams and for the independent and Catholic systems running their own privacy positions, the question this fortnight is whether your sector body has filed a submission on the Code, and if not, whether twelve days is enough to put a one-page response together. The Code is the most consequential children's data instrument the OAIC has published this decade and the surface area is the entire K-12 ed-tech stack. Submissions filed by the schools sector now will shape what gets fixed in the final text before it registers on 10 December, and submissions not filed now will not.
EDUtech Sydney is in nine days, and last week sharpened the floor questions
EDUtech Australia 2026 opens at ICC Sydney on Wednesday 3 June, nine days from this morning. The two-day floor is the largest education-technology procurement floor in the country and the only place Compass, Sentral, Schoolbox, Stile and Edrolo will all be in the same building at the same time. Three things happened in the past seven days that change what state IT leads should be asking on the floor: the NSW IPC published its seven-test generative AI privacy guide and bound the largest public-sector agency in the state to it, Compass logged the performance incidents above, and the OAIC code consultation moved another week closer to closing. EDUtech Australia 2026 at ICC Sydney, and the SchoolNews preview of the agenda and the Innovation Alley stream.
Why this matters: For state and diocesan CIOs, the procurement question on the EDUtech floor is no longer just what the product does. It is the four questions any AI or SIS vendor selling into Australian schools should be able to answer in under a minute on the booth: where does the data sit, what is the uptime track record over the last 90 days, has the vendor lodged a submission on the OAIC children's code, and what is the December 10 readiness on the Privacy Act automated decision-making transparency clock. Vendors who walk onto the floor with those four answers pre-baked will win the conversations that matter. Vendors who treat the questions as procurement noise will lose them. For school principals and business managers not attending, the recordings usually re-publish inside two weeks.
The thread this morning is the operational distance between the policy reading public sector teams have done in May and the day-to-day reliability the schools sector actually depends on. The fortnight ahead will sort the procurement papers that priced the difference from the ones that did not. More on the operational read at digitalattitudes.com.au.