AI in Schools
Senate failed promise inquiry and OAIC code close on the same Friday
The Saturday read is two submission deadlines that land on the same Friday next week, one piece of fresh Australian research on the side effect of the under-16 social media ban, and one Australian read of the supply chain conversation the Canvas and Compass weeks have left on every desk.
Senator Payman's failed promise inquiry closes the same Friday as the OAIC code
Submissions to the Senate Education and Employment References Committee's inquiry into graduate employability and the quality of Australian university education, the one independent senator Fatima Payman tabled in March under the failed promise framing, close at 5pm on Friday 5 June. The brief is broader than the title implies. The terms of reference name AI's effect on entry-level work, the alignment of degree content with employer skill needs, and the quality of university teaching, with the final report due to the Senate in late November. The submissions already published this month include one from an engineering graduate naming the systemic dilution of academic standards as AI automates the on-the-job training window, and one from a UNSW Masters student arguing AI use should not be tolerated in assessment at all. The ACS Information Age write-up of the submissions, 21 May, and the Times Higher Education account of the inquiry's terms of reference, 23 March.
Why this matters: For vice-chancellors and deputy vice-chancellors (academic) deciding what to put on the page before Friday, the procurement bracket is sharper than usual because the OAIC Children's Online Privacy Code consultation closes at close of business on the same day, which means every higher education provider that runs a K-12 outreach, schools partnership, or pathways program is filing two related documents into the same week. For independent and Catholic school heads watching the higher education file, the inquiry will set the rhetorical baseline for the Bachelor of Education the school sends its 2027 leavers into. For the ed-tech vendor side (Cogniti, ChatGPT Edu, Copilot for Education, the cohort of AI tutoring products on Wednesday's EDUtech floor), the Senate transcript over the next six months is the one document the university procurement team will read alongside the Higher Education Standards Framework and the TEQSA assessment reform guides, because Payman has already put a standalone AI act on the table.
QUT and Western Sydney find the under-16 ban cut teen news intake, and the civics number is the warning
A representative survey of 1,027 Australians aged 10 to 17, fielded in February by Michael Dezuanni at QUT and Simon Chambers and Tanya Notley at Western Sydney University, found 61 per cent of under-16s reported little or no change in their use of the banned social media platforms and 26 per cent said their use had been disrupted. Among the disrupted group, 51 per cent reported getting less news. The civics number is the harder one: the 2025 NAP-CC results from ACARA put student civics knowledge at its lowest since the assessment began 20 years ago, and the under-16 social media ban came into effect on 10 December 2025 against that baseline. 75 per cent of the surveyed cohort said news organisations do not understand their lives and 71 per cent said they struggle to find age-relevant news coverage. The research is funded by the ARC and ABC Education through QUT and Western Sydney University. The Conversation piece by Dezuanni, Chambers, and Notley, 17 May.
Why this matters: For HSIE, English, and library teachers writing 2026 Term 3 programs, the QUT and Western Sydney finding is the one that puts a number on the question every careers conversation has been circling, which is whether the December ban has produced a Year 9 cohort that is harder to brief on what is happening in the world than the one that left Year 9 a year ago. For state assessment authorities reading the result alongside last week's NAP-ICTL drop and the AGPPA NAPLAN writing reform call, the cumulative argument is that the digital literacy, news literacy, and civics literacy numbers are all moving in the same direction at the same time, which makes the case for a media literacy line in the next ICT and English procurement papers easier to write. For ed-tech vendors building media literacy and news comprehension products (the ABC's Behind The News and Media Literacy Lab, Stile's news-based science articles, the Crinkling News classroom subscription, the various fact-checking and source-evaluation modules), the data is the procurement door.
Australian third-party risk numbers put the Canvas and Compass weeks in the supply chain frame
BlueVoyant's ANZ managing director Kash Sharma published an op-ed in IT Brief Australia on Thursday 28 May arguing the lesson from the Canvas breach and the Compass performance week is the supply chain one. The Australian numbers in the piece are the part worth taking to the next IT executive meeting: 99 per cent of Australian organisations experienced negative impacts from a third-party breach in the past year, and 30 per cent have established mature third-party risk management programs. The operational read for schools and universities is that the next breach in education will arrive through a vendor's vendor, which is how the Canvas one moved from Instructure's systems to the Queensland QLearn front page and the University of Sydney student portal within 48 hours. The five recommendations are continuous vendor monitoring rather than annual reviews, multi-factor authentication, verifiable software supply chains, clear ownership of risk, and shared threat intelligence with the partners. Sharma's op-ed in IT Brief Australia, 28 May.
Why this matters: For school business managers and university CISOs filing the 2026 to 2027 cyber risk paper to the audit committee, the 30 per cent figure is the one the executive will ask about, because it implies the other 70 per cent of Australian organisations are still doing the annual vendor questionnaire rather than the continuous monitoring the Canvas timeline required. For state Department of Education CIOs walking Wednesday's EDUtech floor with the OAIC Children's Online Privacy Code in mind, the supply chain question is the one the OAIC code is already asking in different words (every vendor stand should answer where its data goes and which sub-processors hold it). For independent and Catholic schools logging into Compass on the bus this morning, the operational read is that the four performance incidents in five business days last week were not a Compass story alone but a story about how many other tools sit downstream of the SIS, which is the cross-vendor scoring question Lozancic's Konica Minolta op-ed put on the table on Monday.
From Digital Attitudes: the platform overlap tool that pairs with the supply chain conversation
We built a free tool that lets a school tick the platforms it uses (Compass, Sentral, Schoolbox, Canvas, SEQTA, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, the AI tools on the EDUtech floor, the AERO and ACARA dashboards), then surfaces where the overlap sits and roughly what that overlap is costing each year. The tool was designed for the procurement conversation, which is the same conversation Sharma's op-ed is pushing schools into this week: every duplicated platform is a duplicated vendor risk surface, and the supply chain map is the same map as the spend map. Read the post on Digital Attitudes.
The thread this morning is the week of paperwork. Two consultations closing on the same Friday, one piece of Australian research that puts a number on the civics side effect of the December ban, and one operational read of the Canvas and Compass weeks that puts the supply chain question on the procurement page. The schools and universities that file the Senate and OAIC submissions, run the platform overlap audit, and price the media literacy line into the next term will be reading the EDUtech floor with a sharper question on Wednesday. More on the operational read at digitalattitudes.com.au.