School-based Perspective Policy in Action

Phase 1: Compliance, Privacy & Risk Governance - Always Safety First For Our Students & Ourselves

• Enforce the "No PII" Rule: Prohibit staff and students from entering Personally Identifiable Information (PII), including student names, assessment records, attendance logs, or behavioural histories into public AI platforms.
• Apply Proportional Risk Zoning: Categorise software usage using structured risk models (such as the VINE 3-Risk-Zone framework): Zone 1 for personal teacher productivity, Zone 2 for vetted classroom tools, and Zone 3 for non-identifying student data requiring formal Privacy Impact Assessments.
• Verify Tech Safety via ST4S: Prior to procuring third-party EdTech platforms, verify security ratings on Education Services Australia’s Safer Technologies 4 Schools (ST4S) portal to ensure data is not harvested or re-used for commercial model training.
• Preserve Human Agency & Consent: Obtain explicit opt-in parental consent for platforms requiring student registration. Ensure educators retain total accountability—never delegate final grading, official report writing, or automated parent communications to AI systems.

Phase 2: Protecting Cognitive Development & Curriculum Integration (Curriculum Leaders)

• Prevent Cognitive Offloading: Design curriculum units that safeguard "productive struggle". Ensure students do not use AI summaries or generation as a shortcut to bypass close reading, decoding, and deep synthesis.
• Distinguish Scaffolding from Offloading: Deploy AI to create background text sets or decodable fluency scaffolds for accessible learning, but avoid assigning permanent low-level AI texts that restrict access to grade-level syntax.
• Embed ACARA v9 AI Literacy: Align unit planning with the ACARA Curriculum Connection: Artificial Intelligence to teach algorithms, machine learning, and data analysis explicitly across Mathematics, Technologies, and Science.
• Manage Cognitive Load & ZPD: Integrate adaptive tools as "learning architects" that monitor cognitive load and offer targeted remediation only when struggle becomes counterproductive.

Phase 3: AI-Resilient Assessment & Academic Integrity (Teachers & Leaders)

• Question AI Detector Practices: Critically question AI plagiarism detection software, recognising its technical unreliability and demonstrated bias against English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D or LBOTE) student.
• Adopt In-Task Process Checkpoints: Structure assessments around verified process milestones, such as sequential draft portfolio collection, literature mapping, source triage, and face-to-face oral defenses (oracy).
• Increase Supervised Assessment: Re-establish supervised, in-class writing tasks and pen-and-paper components for high-stakes summative evaluations in line with state authority guidelines.
• Mandate Student Integrity Training: Require secondary students to complete structured academic integrity training (such as QCAA's mandatory 1-hour certification) to establish clear citation standards and ethical habits.

Phase 4: Classroom Pedagogy & Ethical Practice (Teachers)

• Teach Reflexivity: Train students to question machine objectivity by evaluating AI outputs for bias, hallucination, and missing perspectives rather than treating generated text as objective truth.
• Shift to Really Useful Feedback: Utilise automated tools for routine grammar and structural feedback, only after supporting the teacher's capacity to provide insightful feedback on argument depth, style, and voice.
• Respect Indigenous Data Sovereignty & ICIP: Enforce Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) protocols, ensuring First Nations knowledge, stories, and artworks are not submitted into public datasets without explicit cultural authority.

National Infrastructure Support Matrix