An Aussie Guy Building a New Kind of School

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 culture that produced the model means I can take what works and leave the wrapper behind.

Here's what's worth taking. The boldness, first of all, the willingness to rebuild school from first principles rather than renovate around the edges. The mastery learning, where a child moves forward when they've genuinely got it, not when the calendar says so. And most of all, giving kids their time back. When the academics are done efficiently, the rest of the day belongs to the students, and that's where the speaking, the projects, the teamwork and the joy live. None of that is culturally American. It's just good.

And here's what's worth leaving. The $65,000 a year price tags, obviously. The hustle-culture framing where school is a launchpad for tiny founders. And above all, the winners and losers thing. Australian culture, for all its flaws, has a stubborn streak of the fair go running through it. We're suspicious of tall poppies and we're suspicious of systems that sort children into champions and everyone else. A school model built here should be built on that instinct, not against it.

We've also got our own foundations to build on. Australia moved earlier than most countries on this, with a national Framework for Generative AI in Schools agreed by Education Ministers back in 2023, built around principles like wellbeing, fairness and transparency. The values are already on the page. What's missing is a full working model that takes them seriously at the level of an actual school week, an actual timetable, an actual child's Tuesday.

That's what propelled me to build this new, uniquely Australian system. PrimarAI runs on a 2+4 day and the whole model is published openly for anyone to pull apart, because that felt like the Australian way of doing it too. Not a pitch deck, not a walled garden, just the work, out in the open, with the students' wellbeing in mind most of all.

Strange fit or not, someone from here needed to build one of these for here. So I am.