Safe on Social

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 have worried about the wrong room. We pictured our children in a classroom, or a schoolyard, or a group chat, and we assumed the pressure that shaped them came from the people close enough to touch. Because that is what we knew. The friend who left them out. The classmate who was crueller than necessary. The peer whose approval felt like oxygen. All those big feelings we all experienced as young people. That room still exists. Every parent who has watched

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

............and what it means before the August NCCD census. REGISTER HERE: https://www.safeonsocial.com/event-details/hacking-the-nccd The Federal Budget 2026/27 quietly shifted the compliance ground beneath every Australian school, and most haven't felt it yet. The question is no longer whether a school submitted its NCCD collection; it's whether the funding claims behind it are supported by genuine, evidence-based, inclusive practice. With the Department of Education si