NSW Education AI tool set to launch for students from October

All NSW public school students from Year 5 onwards will gain access to the state’s ChatGPT-style platform, NSWEduChat, from October 14, marking the first system-wide deployment for students.

Developed by the NSW Department of Education, NSWEduChat is a generative AI assistant that is intended to offer a secure and privacy-focused alternative to free public large-language model services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

The launch comes as South Australia prepares to widen the rollout its own generative AI platform, EdChat, to all public high schools from October 13, following a trial with 10,000 students.

NSW Education made the Azure-hosted NSWEduChat available to all teachers and staff in October 2024, following a trial in 50 schools earlier that year where it was described as having been “rigorously tested.”

“NSWEduChat has been designed to respond to students with guidance and by asking open-ended questions that encourage them to explore and share their thoughts and reasoning,” according to new guidance from NSW Education.

“NSWEduChat supports students to deepen their understanding and think critically.”

According to the guidelines, NSWEduChat is limited to generating text-based responses and does not produce images, video, or music.

It also comes with profanity filters, semantic analysis to detect harmful content and topic restrictions.

Use of the platform for homework or assessment tasks is left to individual schools to decide. However, students are expected to notify teachers if they’ve used the tool for academic work, including summarising texts, structuring assignments, or researching terms.