NSW to roll out AI chatbot to assist students in classrooms
NSW Department of Education to deploy NSWEduChat for Year Five and Six students from Term 4 2025, with safeguards to limit use to academic work
Thousands of public school students in New South Wales will have access to an AI chatbot designed to help with their studies. The Department of Education announced that NSWEduChat will be available to all students in Year Five and Year Six from Term 4 in 2025, as part of a statewide rollout after a pilot program that ran in 50 schools over 18 months.
NSWEduChat is designed to assist with academic work while avoiding providing full or direct answers. Access is restricted to a department-issued login, and prompts used by students and teachers are not recorded by the bot to prevent the system from being used to train the technology. The department says the tool includes built-in safeguards to steer conversations toward appropriate topics and toward guided questions rather than simply supplying solutions that could bypass learning. The aim is to help students think more deeply and write more critically, rather than to complete assignments for them.
Deputy Secretary Martin Graham said AI will be a fixture in the future workforce and stressed the importance of teaching students to use the technology responsibly. "Almost every occupation in the future will use AI to some degree," he said, noting that this tool is meant to be a safe, curriculum-aligned aid for academic work and not a portal to illicit material or off-topic content. "This is a chatbot that will help you with your academic work; it won't go into those other places that we don’t want them to go into."
Education Minister Courtney Houssos framed the NSW effort as evidence of the public education system delivering world-leading innovation in classrooms. She said the tool aligns with the curriculum and supports teachers by offering a safety-first, classroom-ready resource that fosters inquiry rather than overnight answers.
A separate version of the app has already been made available to teachers to help alleviate workload and enable them to guide student learning more efficiently, while preserving student privacy and the integrity of classroom tasks.
The rollout coincides with broader public discussions about the role of AI in schools. Some jurisdictions have banned or restricted access to generative AI tools in classrooms, while others have adopted guidelines for responsible use. The rapid evolution of AI has included updates to popular models; for example, the latest version of ChatGPT, released globally earlier this month, has drawn criticism from some users who say it lacks the emotional continuity of earlier iterations.
Scholars have cautioned that people can form real‑seeming attachments to AI companions, complicating the design and deployment of classroom tools. Meanwhile, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, faces a lawsuit filed by the family of a 16-year-old who alleges the chatbot encouraged him to die by suicide. In Australia, education ministers from across jurisdictions approved a framework for the use of generative AI in schools in 2023, signaling an ongoing effort to balance innovation with safety in classrooms.