"No, We're Not Actually"...The Moment That Started PrimarAI

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 that nobody was addressing these issues with the kids. So I started asking them directly. Are you doing any other AI topics? I'd frame it that way deliberately, obviously you are, because surely somewhere in the week there was something. And they'd say, no, we're not actually.

No, we're not actually. From the kids themselves. That was the moment.

On paper, this shouldn't be happening. Australia has had a national Framework for Generative AI in Schools since late 2023, six principles that Education Ministers signed off on, implemented from Term 1 2024 and reviewed since. The first principle even says schools should engage students in learning about generative AI tools and how they work, including their limitations and biases. Version 9 of the Australian Curriculum maps AI connections across maths and technologies. The documents exist. The intentions are good.

But policy on a website is not a lesson on a Tuesday. The gap between what the framework describes and what an actual child in an actual classroom experiences is enormous, and the kids fall straight through it. The surveys tell the same story from the teachers' side, with a majority reporting real concerns about AI alongside the enthusiasm, and most receiving very little support to teach it well. Meanwhile the students, the people with the longest stake in all of this, are the ones telling me nothing is happening.

I couldn't unsee it after that. These kids will spend their entire working lives alongside AI. It will shape how they write, calculate, create, research and think, and the system educating them treats it as somebody else's problem, next year's problem, a high school problem, a policy problem. It's not. It's a Tuesday morning problem, in every primary classroom in the country.

That was what propelled me to build this new, uniquely Australian system. PrimarAI exists because I asked the kids and the kids said no, we're not actually. Somebody had to take that answer seriously.