Safe on Social

............and what it means before the August NCCD census. The Federal Budget 2026/27 did something almost no one in the school system has fully registered yet. It formally tightened compliance and integrity measures around school funding, and in doing so it changed the question every principal in Australia will be expected to answer about their NCCD data. The old question was whether the school submitted the collection. The new question is whether the school can demonstrat

Instructure, the American company behind Canvas and QLearn, has been breached, and the data sitting inside that breach belongs to children. The exposed information includes children’s names, school email addresses, school locations, student ID numbers, and, in some cases, the contents of user messages. What has been taken is enough to send a parent a believable email that appears to come from the school. It is enough to write a child a believable message that looks like it ca

The question came from a Year 6 student. He said it the way children sometimes say things they suspect they shouldn’t know, half curious and half watching my face. At first, I thought he had said Omegle, that older corner of the internet most of us hoped had been buried. But he repeated it slowly, with the patience children extend to adults who are not keeping up. Omoggle. Not Omegle. Something newer, and as I discovered over the following week, something altogether stranger.

I am in regional New South Wales, working onsite at school with young people and watching, in real time, how platform decisions actually impact their lives. This helps inform all of the policy work I do, which is increasing daily at the moment because there is so much change moving through this space at once. Yesterday I spoke with a group of delightful Year 11 and 12 students as one of six sessions I delivered at Scone Grammar. In my first session of the day, all of them exc

The conversation we are having about artificial intelligence in our schools is not where it needs to be yet, and I think most of us already sense it. We are talking about policies and platforms and what to ban, while our kids are already living it and quietly working it out for themselves. The truth is, AI is not coming to our classrooms. It is already there. I do not think the question is whether our young people should be using AI. That ship has well and truly sailed. The q