............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 demonstrate that its...

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 came from a...

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. We are entering...