Furze reads Albanese's AI standards as the win schools got to shape

Digital Attitudes, 18 July 2026

Term 3 opens next week. Three stories about who gets to set the rules on AI and devices in Australian classrooms, and who has to live with them.

Leon Furze reads Albanese's AI standards as the win schools got to shape

Leon Furze, one of the country's most quoted AI in schools commentators, published a piece on his blog on Friday 17 July arguing that the Prime Minister's 15 July address at the University of Sydney is the moment Australia set its own terms on AI, and that the school framework signed off in 2023 was the reason we were positioned to do it (Leon Furze, 17 July). Furze reads the three moving parts of the address (a new Office of AI in Prime Minister and Cabinet, legislated standards for large data centres on power, water and grid contribution, and a copyright rule that AI training on Australian books, music, art or news needs the artist's permission) as demands Australia can make while AI companies still need our land, energy and compute. He pointedly links the "standards should be set by us, in the interests of students" line to the fact that Education Minister Jason Clare was in the same building meeting state education ministers on AI in schools the same day.

Why this matters: For a school principal, the Furze piece is the sanity check on how much of the 15 July address is actually about you. His answer is more than the headlines suggested, because the AI standards will bind the vendors your school buys tools from before any school procurement rule has to change, and the "no training on Australian creative work without permission" line covers the unit plans, assessment materials and student writing that end up in vendor training corpora by default under a lot of current terms of service. The direct implication is that AISNSW, ACEL and Independent Schools Victoria advice on AI vendor selection is about to have a legal floor under it that has never existed, and the K to 12 principals association work with the National AI in Schools Taskforce becomes worth two rungs more on the ladder. For anyone running an AI procurement in Term 3, the Furze read is the one to circulate, because it is short, current and specifically written for a school audience.

Chalkbeat says mandatory digital testing keeps devices in classrooms even where districts want them out

Chalkbeat's Kalyn Belsha published a piece on 16 July arguing that the practical reason US districts cannot follow the "less screens" advice as fast as they want is that federal law requires the annual reading and maths tests in grades 3 to 8, and states have opted for those tests to run online (Chalkbeat, 16 July). The Los Angeles Unified board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin is quoted saying LA will not ban screens after first grade because "third grade is the first year of testing, and we wouldn't want that to be the first time kids are getting exposed to devices". Baltimore is cutting devices in early primary but keeping them in Year 3 for the same reason, Granville County North Carolina says it has no choice ("if I had the choice, I'd say bubble sheets please", superintendent Stan Winborne), and psychometrician Scott Marion is on the record that decisions driven only by test format are a bad basis for teaching decisions.

Why this matters: For every Victorian primary principal working out how to hit the F to 2 minimal use rule and the Year 3 to 6 ninety minute daily cap from 2027 while running practice sessions for NAPLAN Year 3, this is the exact bind about to land on the Term 3 professional practice day. NAPLAN went fully online in 2022, the state's device policy says the Term 3 2026 update lands with more detailed guidance in the next fortnight, and the practical tension is the same as LA's. The read for an Australian curriculum leader is not that Victoria is wrong to restrict devices, it is that whichever way that policy update lands, the assessment platform stays online, so the honest planning question is what "planned device free time" looks like for a Year 3 cohort that also has to be fluent enough on a keyboard to sit an online writing test in Term 1. That question needs an answer that is not "we will find time on Tuesdays" by the start of the next school year.

Princeton ends 133 years of unproctored exams, and the Brown University 48 versus 96 result is now the number every Senate is passing around

Princeton's faculty voted in May to require universal proctoring for every in person examination, ending 133 years of no proctoring under the Honor Code, and the change took effect on 1 July (The Daily Princetonian, 15 May). The reason: a 2025 senior survey put self reported AI cheating at 29.9 per cent, and 44.6 per cent of seniors admitted seeing an Honor Code violation and not reporting it. The story that ran alongside the Princeton change was Brown University economics professor Vincent Crawford's decision to switch his advanced mathematical economics final from take home to in person after noticing the midterm scored a class average of 96 with almost half the class on 100; the in person final's average was 48 (The Boston Globe on Brown, 15 July).

Why this matters: For an Australian DVC (Academic) or Academic Board chair, Princeton is the escalator every research intensive Australian is now on. Sydney banned AI in supervised exams from Semester 2, 2025, Murdoch mandated face to face finals, and Curtin turned off Turnitin's AI detector in January. Adding proctors to already unsupervised exams is the next step, and it is the one that gets debated in a Senate that has not had to think about invigilation staffing since the 1990s. The Crawford 48 versus 96 gap is the number to keep, because it is the first cross checked example of what an actual competency delta looks like when the take home component is stripped out, and it is the number a Vice Chancellor will quote to justify the exam infrastructure spend that funds an extra 200 invigilators a semester. The uncomfortable second question is that the same 48 per cent, if it holds up in a second sitting, is a signal about whether the degree is grading learning or grading practice, which is bigger than proctoring and probably needs its own paper on the DVC (Academic) desk before December.

Term 3 opens Monday. Set the rules or live with someone else's. More at digitalattitudes.com.au.