Have a look at the science and technology syllabus, for introduction in 2027 (!), and see if you can find any reference to AI.

Sometimes a cigar it’s just a cigar but on some days, it feels like cigar is, and excuse mixed metaphor, a slightly smoking gun. I...

China and the UAE made AI education compulsory from the 2025-26 school year. New Zealand is heading for a compulsory AI learning area by 2027 and ran a national Day of AI in schools this year. Alabama now requires AI instruction to graduate, one of 77 bills across 27 American states, and WA is spending $4.6 million putting its ClassmAIte tool into more than a hundred schools. Meanwhile I went looking through the NSW Science and Technology syllabus arriving in 2027 for a menti

Fifteen things a Year 6 kid graduating from the school I'm describing has to be able to do. Read fluently, write a 2,000-word researched piece, and edit their own work Work across the whole NSW K-6 maths syllabus with mastery, not bluff Give a ten-minute talk to a room of unfamiliar adults, no notes Lead a yarning circle on a topic they chose Swim a kilometre in open water and handle themselves around a small boat Finish a half marathon or equivalent Cook a meal for thirty pe

Australian teachers work 46.5 hours a week according to TALIS, third longest in the OECD, and 34 per cent report high stress against an OECD average of 19. Every AI product in education promises the same fix, time saved, and one commonly quoted figure is six weeks a year for regular users. Suppose it's true. My prediction is that not a minute of it reaches a child. It'll be absorbed by data entry, compliance, a new framework, a platform that needs populating. Teacher workload

The ABC's 7.30 took its cameras into Australian classrooms recently to see how schools are handling generative AI, and one comment from the report has stuck with me ever since. A UNSW lecturer put it plainly: it's not a question of whether students are ready for the AI revolution, because they're already in it. No waiting, no lead time, no phased rollout. The kids are living through it right now, and everything else in the debate has to start from that fact. What the report s

Here it is, before someone else finds it. The whole two-hour morning depends on a tutor that doesn't exist. I've described an AI that knows where a child sits against every NSW outcome, pitches work at their edge, asks Socratic questions instead of answering, flags the coach when a kid's been stuck for two minutes, runs on Australian infrastructure and never trains on student work. Nothing on the market does all of that. EduChat is close on privacy and stops at Year 5. The Am

California now requires companion chatbots to tell a minor they're talking to a machine, and to repeat the reminder every three hours. We have legislated for machines to periodically remind children they aren't people, because otherwise the children forget. That's where we are. UNICEF put out a policy brief on AI companions and kids in June, eSafety did the same in March, and Harvard Business Review's research keeps finding that the most common use of AI, two years running, i

Australian schools are tightening the screws on AI at the moment, and honestly, I understand why. The ABC has been covering it closely, with education departments across the country cracking down on students using AI to cheat, and NSW going as far as pausing take-home assessments while it reviews what AI is doing to student learning. Behind all of that sits a genuine fear of cheating, of over-reliance, of kids outsourcing the very thinking that school exists to build. Those f

As an Aussie guy who grew up in Sydney, I never had that sort of cultural baggage of extreme entrepreneurism and the winner versus loser tropes and memes that run like a thread through American culture, for better or worse. So when I found myself drawn to Alpha School, an American, venture-flavoured, unashamedly disruptive model, it was a strange fit for me. I've sat with that strangeness for a while now, and I've come to think it's actually an advantage. Being outside the cu

There wasn't one big moment. It was day after day of seeing what could be done, and working with students who I realised were learning stuff that was clearly never going to be needed, or skills that were never going to be required in the future. You stand in a classroom in 2026 with a full picture of what AI can already do, and you watch children carefully practising things that the world outside the gate has quietly stopped asking for. What made it worse was the recognition

It was a podcast that did it. I heard the founder of Alpha School being interviewed, and he genuinely, obviously cares about education. Sure, he had an ego, the sort you can imagine a billionaire would have. But he was also willing to say he's made mistakes and will make mistakes in the future. That stopped me. Not the two-hour learning claims, not the growth data, not the vision of AI tutors. The admission of error. Education reform has a graveyard, and it's full of confiden

I was wondering why the Alpha way seems so attractive straight off. I think it's because it embodies so much of what progressive education was trying to achieve, and it manages to be both bold and revolutionary while having the students' wellbeing in mind most of all. That combination is rarer than it sounds. Education reform usually gives you one or the other. You get bold ideas that treat children as an afterthought, or you get warm, child-centred rhetoric that never actual

There is only one thing to talk about today, for any Ai educator. Bill has put his essay on the line. It reads pretty well actually, you can see the man through the words. It’s one of those things that AI can never do. I’m putting the essay here as I believe its important. He genuinely comes from a place of concern. It doesn’t say much about education. What stood out is the jobs that will be left will involve skills that take many years to learn. The whole idea of credentiali

NSWEduChat is genuinely good work. Australian-hosted, Socratic by design, data stays in NSW, and it's been called the largest deployment of generative AI to students anywhere. It also starts at Year 5. Which means a K-4 teacher in a NSW public school has no sanctioned tool, no platform, and no structured way to teach a seven year old what this thing is. That seven year old is meanwhile using ChatGPT on a parent's phone in the back of the car, ask any Stage 1 teacher. I unders

Stanford's SCALE team reviewed the research on AI in schools this year. Out of more than 800 papers they found 20 with strong causal evidence, and not one high-quality causal study of a student-facing AI tool in an American K-12 classroom. The pattern in the studies that do exist is the interesting bit. Kids perform better on maths, coding and writing while the tool is in front of them, and when you take it away and test them on their own the effects are mixed. Performance go

Axios reports Alpha School is expanding from about a dozen campuses to fifty this year, at $45,000 to $75,000 US a head. I've quoted Alpha more than almost anyone in Australia, the 2+4 day in my Blueprint came straight from watching what they proved possible, so I should say clearly where I get off the bus. The evidence isn't there. Alpha publishes MAP results in the 90th-plus percentiles, but those are Alpha's own numbers, submitted by Alpha and never independently audited.

NAPLAN came out on 5 August, and Numeracy up in Years 5, 7 and 9, reading down in all three, and Year 3 numeracy at its lowest since the new proficiency levels started. About one in ten kids still needs additional support. It seemed to ahve the usual responses, and understandably. More explicit teaching, more funding, another curriculum review. Yet nobody anywhere suggested that six hours might be the wrong number. We've run the same day for over a century, one teacher, thirt

Anthropic launched Claude for Teachers in July, free for verified US educators. OpenAI has had ChatGPT for Teachers since November, Google is building Gemini into its education products, and Microsoft brought Elevate for Educators to Australia in April. Free for teachers is now simply the entry price, which tells you what's actually being bought. Whichever lab becomes the default in teacher workflow becomes the default in the school, and then in the procurement cycle. That's

A sobering number this week, out of a big new study. Only one in five people think our schools, colleges and universities are doing a good job of getting young people ready for an AI world. The same study found young people using AI constantly, while the thing employers most want out of it, creative thinking, is the one today's tools can't reliably deliver. I don't take that as a reason to panic. I take it as permission. If four out of five of us can feel that the current mod