The influence of AI within Australia’s classrooms over the past three years has sparked renewed debate on everything from data protection and academic integrity to student wellbeing and assessment, but for many school leaders the key question remains the same – is it helping students learn better?
Equally important for leaders is the question of whether AI is truly helping to prepare young people not only for the jobs of today, but those that don’t even exist yet.
This is a challenge at the heart of IgnitED, a new national event series from Powering Skills Organisation uniting leading voices from education and industry to explore the future of learning, training and workforce capability.
The free online event, which ran between 12-26 June, included 10 live sessions and 20 speakers who presented live webinars, on-demand content, podcasts and hands-on toolkits, built for educators, RTO leaders and energy professionals “ready to lead what’s next.”
‘AI adoption has now outrun the research’
During the week of 15-19 June, two sessions explored how AI is transforming teaching in real time in schools, VET and industry. One of the speakers at the event was Matthew Esterman, who presented a podcast and a webinar, exploring these topics in detail.
Esterman, who has worked in education for over 15 years as a teacher, school leader, presenter, writer, and consultant, is the recipient of several awards, including the Commonwealth Bank Teaching Fellowship for 2023 supported by Australian Schools Plus.
In 2024, Esterman founded The Next Word, a consultancy that helps schools and organisations “bridge the gap between rapid technological advancement and lived reality.”
When asked what the research shows about how AI is being used in Australian classrooms today, Esterman said adoption has now outrun the research, and the research is running its own race.
“Useful insights are emerging, but narrow: far more in higher ed than K-12, much of it on tools we've already outgrown,” Esterman told The Educator. “We forget these are products from commercially-incentivised labs, where research runs constantly and rapidly but not for schools’ benefit.”
Rather than rushing to conclusions, Esterman said schools should focus on what is happening now.
“We can’t generalise anything at the moment about AI in Australian classrooms, except to say that teachers and leaders are the best equipped to deal with this challenge and opportunity because they have students’ best interests at the core of their being,” he said.
“What I’d like to see is research into some of the innovative, ground-breaking and assumption-challenging work happening right now, not just looking at how AI affects test scores. We have a live experiment happening right now, and our schools are in it.”
‘A locked gate with a flimsy warning sign teaches nothing’
Taking a panoramic view of AI in the education landscape, Esterman sees some key opportunities, risks and guardrails for educators and education policymakers to consider when it comes to how this technology is being used in education.
“The opportunity includes time and cognitive load: used well, AI gives teachers back hours and differentiates at a scale we couldn't staff for,” he said. “The most immediate risk is wellbeing, particularly students turning to AI for therapy and companionship. That's happening now, mostly out of sight.”
Esterman said this means that guardrails need to work on two fronts.
“Inside the school gates: protect data, keep professional judgement in the loop, lead with purpose not products,” he said. “Beyond them: accept students and staff will use these tools when, not if, they leave our safe zone, and equip them to do so wisely. A locked gate with a flimsy warning sign teaches nothing.”
Teaching discernment in the age of AI
With AI literacy becoming an essential skill for educators and students, Esterman pointed to several critical areas of professional development for students and staff in terms of upskilling in AI.
“For staff, the priority is both training and judgement in context: knowing when AI helps learning and when it short-circuits it, and seeing the wellbeing risks when students lean on these tools for support they should get from people,” he said. “We also need to make space for teachers to explore new ways of doing what we’ve done for generations.”
For students, it's age-appropriate literacy framed around integrity, disclosure and safety, not prohibition, including honest talk about why a chatbot is a poor substitute for a friend or counsellor.
“Underpinning both is epistemic resilience: the habit of asking ‘how do I know this is true?’ The aim is to know when to not use the tools, and being brave enough to do so.”
Start human, use AI, stay human
Esterman said he tends to resist the idea that schools should reverse-engineer themselves around the job market, pointing out that the most future-ready thing educators can do is deepen what's most human – judgement, ethical reasoning, collaboration, communication and the ability to keep learning.
“My shorthand is ‘start human, use AI, stay human’,” Esterman said. “Practically, leaders embed AI as a tool that amplifies thinking rather than replaces it, and stay explicit about where we deliberately keep the friction, because the friction is the learning.”
Esterman said schools don't prepare students for the future by making them more like machines.
“We do it by helping them be the most real version of themselves.”