Safe on Social

Everyone is arguing about whether Apple’s new child‑safety features are “good enough.” But are we missing the real story that, after 15 years of governmental failure to deliver interoperable, human‑rights‑respecting age assurance, Apple has quietly stepped into the space and started turning itself into part of the trust infrastructure of childhood online. For years, policymakers have warned about the dangers of fragmented regulation. If every government builds its own syste

After a digital safety session in Sydney last week, a Year 11 student wrote to me. He had approached me after the session with a question about my thoughts on AI use. One of those incredibly curious and deep thinking young minds. So much so that I said to the teacher near me “He will be the Prime Minister one day”. Yesterday he emailed me through our contact page on the website because something had been bothering him, and he had more questions for me. He said he had watched

For a long time, we worried about the wrong room. We pictured our children in a classroom, a schoolyard, a group chat, and assumed the pressure shaping them came from people close enough to touch. That room still exists. Every parent who has watched their child’s face collapse over a single message knows it exists. But it is no longer the only room, and it may no longer be the most powerful one. A growing part of childhood now unfolds somewhere less known and that is not amon

When a teacher is humiliated by students online, schools often reach for the same toolkit: A behaviour policy, an anti-bullying procedure, a quiet word in a digital citizenship lesson built for a world before algorithmic amplification. The harm was treated as something a student did and could be made to undo. For years these were filed under student conduct, and for years that filing made a certain kind of sense. It no longer does. The arrival of deepfakes, generative image t

By Kirra Pendergast Somewhere in the United Kingdom, late last year, an email arrived at a school. Inside it were images of children who attend that school. Real children, named and recognisable, their faces lifted from the school’s own website and social media accounts, then run through an AI tool and turned into sexual abuse material. The message attached to them was simple. Pay, or we publish. In my Professional Learning sessions I ask school leadership teams to sit with w