AI in Schools
WSU integrity Pro VC's anti AI op ed pulled by the Herald
Digital Attitudes, 9 June 2026
The Tuesday read is the cleanest week of evidence yet that the Australian institutional position on student AI use and the Australian institutional position on staff AI use are not the same paragraph. One Pro Vice-Chancellor's op ed got pulled by the Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday, one Melbourne consultancy's 4,000 teacher survey lands on the same desks this morning, and one West Australian Budget line books $4.6 million for the department-built lesson-plan tool the survey says teachers actually want.
WSU's Pro VC for Quality and Integrity gets her anti AI op ed pulled by the Herald
Professor Cath Ellis, Western Sydney University's Pro Vice-Chancellor for Quality and Integrity, published an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on Tuesday 3 June responding to Macquarie's Kylie Moore-Gilbert (who had accused Australian universities of "widespread, industrial-scale fraud" in a SMH piece days earlier), arguing that students who submit AI-generated work undermine the purpose of assessment. The Guardian ran the piece through AI detection platform Pangram and the article came back as AI-generated. The Herald pulled the column on Thursday 4 June. Ellis confirmed she had uploaded 40,000 words of her own original materials into a Microsoft Copilot Large Language Model and drafted from the prompts the model returned. Her line: "It was written with AI, and there's a really big difference there." WSU said the AI use was "a sophisticated and appropriate" use. Herald editor Jordan Baker said the paper "was not informed of the use of AI in the compilation of the article by either the author or Western Sydney University. Clearly this is unacceptable and we are investigating further." Mediaweek on the incident and the timeline, and Information Age on the WSU statement and the Ellis defence.
Why this matters: For vice-chancellors and deputy vice-chancellors (academic) writing the institution's 2026 to 2027 AI disclosure policy this week, the Ellis incident is now the case study every internal AI use disclosure draft will be read against, because the position the office holder responsible for academic integrity took (drafting with Copilot is fine, even when arguing students should not draft with Copilot) is the position the institution's own students will quote back at the discipline committee when the next academic integrity panel sits. For the higher-ed AI sector reading the TEQSA toolkit update of 8 May and the Universities Australia 15 May TEQSA response together, the Pangram-on-the-Herald check is the operational read that the Australian academic press is now spot-checking university opinion pieces with the same tooling the universities are buying from Turnitin and GPTZero (the same tooling Curtin disabled in January and that the EDUtech panel last week called the wrong frame). For ed-tech vendors selling AI detection and AI policy templates into Australian institutions, the procurement line just got sharper: the institution that cannot articulate its own AI disclosure rule for staff in writing this week is the institution whose students will tell the discipline committee the rule is not in writing.
Learning First says 80 percent of NSW teachers want AI out of student work
The Melbourne education consultancy Learning First released "AI use in schools: Taking action now" on Sunday 24 May, drawing on responses from more than 4,000 NSW teachers and school leaders across government, Catholic and independent schools. Around three-quarters of lower secondary teachers and 73 per cent of senior secondary teachers say students use AI on schoolwork, and around three-quarters of those say students use AI to complete assessments even though more than 80 per cent of teachers say students face restrictions on doing so. Half of secondary teachers say they do not know how to prevent AI-related plagiarism in take-home work. Learning First CEO Dr Ben Jensen's line is the report's headline argument: "AI is in schools now, so the time for action is now. Schools need to maintain effective learning and the integrity of assessment, which means taking AI out of student work." The report calls for NESA to update academic integrity guidance and for a coordinated leadership response across NSW government, Catholic and independent systems. Information Age on the report findings, 26 May, and the Learning First Medianet release, 24 May.
Why this matters: For independent and Catholic school heads briefing the term 3 academic integrity policy this morning, the 80 per cent figure is the line every assessment redesign paper the leadership team writes between now and the start of term 3 will be read against, and the take-home assessment is the format the report names as the failure point the system has 12 weeks to act on. For state Department of Education CIOs across NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia reading the survey alongside the Luckin "enforcement is the wrong question" line from the EDUtech wrap on Friday, the operational read is that the survey body and the conference body are now pulling in opposite directions on the same problem: the survey wants AI out of student work, the conference wants assessment redesigned around AI. For ed-tech vendors selling student AI seat licences (ChatGPT Edu, Copilot for Education) and AI lesson planning tools into NSW schools, the procurement question the survey hands the buyer is whether the school's current vendor stack supports the take-AI-out-of-student-work position the report names, and the answer for most stacks is no.
WA books $4.6 million for ClassmAIte at 100 schools as the department-built answer
Premier Roger Cook and Education Minister Sabine Winton confirmed in the WA 2026-27 Budget on Sunday 11 May that ClassmAIte, the WA department's lesson-planning AI tool now running in 60 schools, gets $4.6 million of new funding to extend the pilot to more than 100 schools by the end of 2026. ClassmAIte was launched in July 2024 under the Federal and State Workload Reduction Fund and lets teachers generate lesson sequences, lesson plans and classroom resources through a secure chat function with editable outputs and specialist tools that allow content to be tailored to individual student needs. The platform sits alongside NSWEduChat, SA EdChat and Queensland's Corella as one of four state-built tools, each hosted inside the state's secure environment rather than shipping student or staff data to a foreign vendor. The WA Premier's release on the $4.6 million allocation, 11 May, and The Mandarin's read of the WA play, 11 May.
Why this matters: For state Department of Education CIOs in Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT (the three jurisdictions without a department-built AI tool on the public record), the WA Budget line is the comparator the next state Budget will be read against, and the question the Treasury brief will hand back is whether the absence of a state-built tool means the procurement team is now buying seat licences against a NSW-Victoria-Queensland-SA-WA precedent. For independent and Catholic school heads briefing the term 3 procurement cycle, ClassmAIte's 60 to 100 school growth between now and December is the cohort the next free or low-cost AI tool conversation will be measured against, because a department-built free platform inside a secure state environment is not the same procurement question as a foreign seat licence the parent consent form has to be rewritten for. For ed-tech vendors selling AI lesson planning tools (Education Perfect's AI features, Stile's AI library updates, the MagicSchool and Eduaide imports) into Australian schools, the operational read is that the state-built tools have moved from pilot to budget line in five of eight jurisdictions, which means the renewal conversation in 2027 will sit against a free comparator the school already has access to.
The thread this morning is that the Australian institutional answer on AI is not one position, it is three. The integrity office at Western Sydney drafted its anti AI position with AI and got pulled, the survey body at Learning First says take AI out of student work, and the Cook government in WA books $4.6 million more for the department-built tool the survey body's teachers want. More on the operational read at digitalattitudes.com.au.