One department wrote this policy. The same department can change it.
Nothing here asks you to argue with your school. A principal who follows departmental policy is not the problem, and a single school changing its settings fixes one page out of 1,713. The NSW Department of Education writes the instruction, so that is where the pressure belongs.
Three changes, one department, no legislation
Every letter on this page asks for the same three things, in order of how little they cost the department. The first one costs a memo. None of them needs parliament, a review or a consultation, and all three sit inside the department's own authority.
Tell schools that AI scraping counts as a risk
PD-2011-0418-01 carries the prohibition and its own exception in the same subsection, under the heading “Keep the school account open”. The prohibition reads: school accounts “must not restrict access or be set as ‘private’ or ‘closed.’” Three sentences later the same clause says:
“This does not mean that a school cannot restrict access, set as private or closed, or suspend the school account from time to time if required to manage or address any risks or issues.”
So a school may already close its account to manage a risk. What no school has is a departmental statement that AI scraping and deepfake generation counts as one. Until the department says so, a principal who restricts an account after reading the eSafety advisory departs from a written instruction on their own judgement. Most, reasonably, will not.
The guidance should:
- confirm that the risks in the eSafety advisory of 28 July 2026 are risks for which the existing exception already permits a school to restrict its account;
- adopt eSafety's pre-publication checklist as departmental practice, including its two settings questions: “Is the account public?” and “Do archived pages or past posts still need to remain public?”;
- name the alternatives schools already have, including the department platforms the procedures require for talking to parents;
- deal with the historical archive, which stays publicly readable long after a school stops posting.
eSafety has already said whose job this is: “schools or school sectors can set common expectations and share practical guidance, reducing the need for each school to build its response from scratch.” And: “school sectors can give principals clear guidance and shared language.”
What it takes: departmental guidance. No amendment, no consultation, no legislation.
Rewrite the clause that says “Keep the school account open”
The procedures justify the clause like this: “the main purpose for using a public platform is to reach a broader audience and build a stronger community, which includes extended family and friends of students and people in the local area.”
The same document then tells schools not to use those accounts “as a primary method of communicating with parent or carers”, and to use department platforms instead. So the open setting does not serve the school community. It adds reach to people outside it, and to every automated system that crawls the public web.
That rationale also predates all of this:
- the eSafety advisory of 28 July 2026, and the 100-plus reports it counted in a single quarter about anonymous accounts targeting schools, almost all built from imagery harvested from school social media or websites
- Meta confirming under oath that it scrapes all public posts to train AI (September 2024)
- Clearview AI taking 50 billion photos from Facebook for facial recognition, which the OAIC found breached the Privacy Act
- Human Rights Watch finding 362 Australian children in one AI training dataset (July 2024)
- Explicit deepfakes of Australian schoolgirls generated from publicly accessible photos (June 2024)
Rewrite the clause so that a closed or restricted setting is permitted, and is the starting point, for any account that publishes identifiable images of students. Victoria's education department already encourages restricted access. NSW is the outlier in requiring open accounts.
The department can also act once instead of 1,713 times. Its own social media team creates school Facebook accounts, and “all school accounts on Facebook must be linked to the department's Business Manager”.
What it takes: an administrative policy update. No legislation.
Rebuild the Permission to Publish form parents sign
eSafety asks schools two questions about consent: “Is consent active, informed and current? Does it cover school social media posts?” The current NSW form fails every part. It bundles social media with the newsletter and the school website in one yes or no, it mentions no AI training, no facial recognition, no scraping and no deepfakes, and it never expires.
The rebuilt form should carry:
- Consent by channel. Separate choices for the school newsletter, the school website, social media, and external media.
- Plain disclosure of the AI risk. Say that photos on public social media can be scraped to train AI, added to facial recognition databases, and used to generate synthetic images.
- Annual renewal. Expire the consent each year, because the risk keeps moving.
- Social media as a specific opt-in. Do not bundle it with general publishing consent.
What it takes: a form update. No legislation.
Schools want to be told what the right thing now looks like
None of these three asks criticises schools or principals. The audit verified the same pattern in 79% of them, across metro, regional and remote NSW alike, because that is what following the policy produces.
As it stands, principals hold a risk they cannot reduce without departing from a written instruction, and the department carries 1,713 exposures it centrally required. Where the resulting material is not sexual, eSafety notes it “may fall outside the legal criteria” for removal, so there may be no remedy after the fact. Guidance costs less than an incident, and the department is the only party that can issue it.
An earlier version of this campaign also asked for federal privacy reform, a national standard across states, an opt-out from Meta's AI training, and enforcement of the Clearview AI deletion order. Those remain worth doing, and The System sets out the federal gap.
They are not asks any more, because they gave the one body that can act tomorrow somewhere else to point. The three above are administrative, they are all NSW, and they are all in the department's gift.
Write to the member who represents your local schools
Enter your postcode. You will see how many government schools in that state electorate run public Facebook Pages, how many students attend them, and a letter to that electorate's member that you can edit and send in about two minutes.
It tells you which state electorates contain the NSW government schools in your postcode. It is not a check of where you are enrolled to vote. 82 of the 532 postcodes with a government school span more than one electorate, and where yours does, you pick from a short list.
To confirm the electorate you vote in, look it up by address at the NSW Electoral Commission.
School and student counts come from the April 2026 audit joined to the NSW Public Schools Master Dataset. We took member names and electorate office email addresses from each member's official profile page on parliament.nsw.gov.au on 4 August 2026. We never guess an email address from a naming pattern, so where a member publishes a contact form instead of an address, the page links the form.
Write to the Minister and the Secretary
Two people can change this policy without going near parliament. The letter below needs no postcode.
The Hon. Prue Car MP
Deputy Premier, and Minister for Education and Early Learning. The policy sits in her portfolio. She can direct the department to update it.
Ministerial contact form
Electorate office: londonderry@parliament.nsw.gov.au
Murat Dizdar PSM
Secretary, NSW Department of Education. He administers the departmental procedures and the Permission to Publish form. Ask number one needs only his signature.
Dear Deputy Premier,
I am writing about NSW Department of Education policy PD-2011-0418, which requires school social media accounts to be public, and about the eSafety Commissioner's advisory of 28 July 2026.
The advisory, Sharing school imagery in the age of AI, tells schools that “posting fewer images of school students and personnel – or none at all – can reduce the risk”, and that a risk-based approach helps schools decide which images are “better shared in a closed or restricted space”. Its checklist asks schools to consider “Is the account public?”
Departmental procedure PD-2011-0418-01 requires the opposite. Under the heading “Keep the school account open” it states that school accounts “must not restrict access or be set as ‘private’ or ‘closed.’” An audit of every NSW government school verified 1,713 of them, serving 596,069 students, operating public Facebook Pages under that instruction, in all 93 state electorates.
eSafety reports that between January and March 2026 it received more than 100 reports about anonymous accounts targeting schools and school staff, and that almost all “involved imagery harvested from school social media accounts or websites”. Where that material is not sexual, eSafety notes it “may fall outside the legal criteria” for removal, so there may be no remedy after the fact.
I am asking for three things, in order of how little they cost:
- Issue guidance confirming that AI scraping and deepfake generation is a risk that justifies restricting a school account. The procedures already state that a school may restrict access “to manage or address any risks or issues”, so this requires no amendment. What principals lack is a departmental statement that this risk qualifies.
- Amend the “Keep the school account open” clause so restricted or closed settings are permitted, and are the default, for accounts publishing images of children.
- Rebuild the Permission to Publish form: granular consent by channel, explicit disclosure of AI training, scraping and deepfake risk, and annual renewal.
None of these requires legislation. The department's social media team creates school Facebook accounts and links them centrally to the department's Business Manager, so the department can change the standard once instead of leaving 1,713 principals to decide alone. eSafety says as much: “schools or school sectors can set common expectations and share practical guidance, reducing the need for each school to build its response from scratch.”
I would appreciate a response setting out whether the department will act, and by when.
Yours sincerely,
Name: _______________
Suburb and postcode: _______________
The email button opens a shortened version of the letter above. The ministerial contact form takes the full text if you would rather paste it.
Prue Car, Deputy Premier and Minister for Education and Early Learning, is the Member for Londonderry. Thirteen schools in her electorate, with 9,431 students between them, run public Facebook Pages under the policy her portfolio administers. That puts Londonderry tenth of the 93 state electorates by student exposure. See how every electorate ranks →
Take it to the department through your P&C
A P&C cannot direct a school, and this motion does not try to. It puts the parent body on record calling on the Department of Education to change the policy, and refers the matter upward to the P&C Federation, which represents parent bodies at state level and can raise it with the department directly.
Asking one school to restrict its account puts a principal in conflict with a written departmental instruction, and protects the children at that school only. Asking the department to change the instruction protects children at all 1,713 of them, and asks nothing of the principal that policy does not already allow.
Background
NSW Department of Education procedure PD-2011-0418-01 requires that school accounts on public platforms “must not restrict access or be set as ‘private’ or ‘closed.’” An audit of every NSW government school verified that 1,713 schools, serving 596,069 students, operate public Facebook Pages.
What changed
On 28 July 2026 the eSafety Commissioner published an advisory on sharing school imagery in the age of AI. It advises that:
- “Posting fewer images of school students and personnel – or none at all – can reduce the risk.”
- Some images are “better shared in a closed or restricted space”.
- Schools should ask, before publishing, “Is the account public?” and “Do archived pages or past posts still need to remain public?”
- Consent should be checked against the question “Does it cover school social media posts?”, which the current NSW Permission to Publish form does not address.
- “Schools or school sectors can set common expectations and share practical guidance, reducing the need for each school to build its response from scratch.”
eSafety also reported that between January and March 2026 it received more than 100 reports about anonymous accounts targeting schools and school staff, and that almost all “involved imagery harvested from school social media accounts or websites”.
The gap
The department's procedures already state that restricting access is permitted “to manage or address any risks or issues”. No departmental guidance confirms that AI scraping and deepfake generation is such a risk, so a principal acting on the eSafety advisory would be departing from a written instruction on their own judgement.
Supporting evidence
Full sources, the audit methodology, and the figures for every NSW state electorate: algorithms.technology
Motion
That this P&C Association calls on the NSW Department of Education to:
- issue guidance confirming that the risks identified in the eSafety Commissioner's advisory of 28 July 2026 constitute risks for which restricting a school social media account is permitted under existing procedure;
- amend PD-2011-0418-01 so that restricted or closed settings are permitted, and are the default, for school accounts that publish images of students; and
- revise the Permission to Publish form so that consent is granular by channel, discloses AI training, scraping and synthetic media risks explicitly, and is renewed annually;
and further, that this motion be forwarded to the NSW P&C Federation for consideration as state policy, and a copy sent to the Minister for Education and Early Learning and to the local member.
How to present it
Keep it to five minutes. Lead with the eSafety advisory, because it comes from the federal regulator, is dated 28 July 2026, and removes the argument that this is one parent's theory. Then read the department's clause. The contradiction does the work. Hand out printed copies rather than reading the motion aloud, and leave time for questions.
What you will hear, and what to say
"This is a matter for the department, not us."
Agreed, and that is exactly what the motion says. It asks nothing of the school. It puts the parent body on record with the department, which is the only body that can fix it.
"Our Facebook page is how we build our community."
The department's own procedures say it is not: schools must “not use school accounts on public platforms as a primary method of communicating with parent or carers” and must use email, the school website and school apps instead. The motion does not ask the school to leave Facebook. It asks the department to let the account be closed to members.
"Nothing has actually happened at our school."
eSafety counted more than 100 reports in a single quarter about anonymous accounts targeting schools and staff, almost all built from imagery harvested from school social media accounts or websites. The people who make this material usually publish it anonymously and off-platform, so a school tends to learn about it late, from a student.
"Won't this get the principal in trouble?"
No, because the motion does not ask the principal to depart from policy. It asks the department to change it. That distinction is the reason the motion is worded this way.
What parents and staff report
Everything else on this site is a sourced finding. You can click through to a government document, a Senate transcript, a regulator's advisory or a published dataset, and check it yourself.
This section is different. It collects what parents, teachers and principals tell us they have been asked to do, and what they have seen. It is unverified by design. We publish nothing here without permission, we never name a school or a person without explicit consent, and we do not present any of it as evidence of what the department's practice is. Where an account can be corroborated with a document, it stops being an account and moves to the sourced pages.
The pattern we are trying to document
The public policy text goes as far as requiring accounts to be open, and encourages “sharing positive stories such as awards and achievements”. Separately, people tell us the department encourages schools in practice to post actively and often, and treats photographs of children enjoying school as the most valuable content for building the school's profile against nearby non-government schools.
We cannot show you a document that says that, so we are not asserting it. The department's Social media toolkit for school staff, which is the guidance principals actually work from, is not published publicly. We have applied for it and related records under the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009. If the documents show this, we will publish them and cite them. If they show the opposite, we will publish that too.
If you work in a NSW school
What are you actually asked to do about social media, and by whom? Directions about posting frequency, enrolment or promotion, any training or toolkit material, and what happens if a page is restricted. Documents are the most useful thing you can send.
If you are a parent or carer
What were you told when you signed the Permission to Publish form, what happened when you asked for your child's photo not to be posted publicly, and what response you got from the school or the department.
If somebody has misused imagery from a school
You do not have to tell us. Report it to eSafety, who can act on it. If you also want it counted in the policy argument, tell us only what you are comfortable sharing, and nothing identifying a child.
What you send goes to a person, not a database. If you would rather not use email, or you need to talk about this carefully, write to hello@algorithms.technology and say so. Please do not send us any image of a child.
Three more things that help
Send the advisory to one person who can act on it
A principal, a P&C president, a school board member, a journalist, a staffer. The single most useful link is the two documents side by side, because it takes about a minute to read and it is not an opinion.
If you are a journalist, the material is ready
The audit is reproducible from public data, the electorate breakdown is available for any seat, and the media pack quotes both primary documents with links. Everything for media is here.
Subscribe, so the pressure does not stop at one letter
Policy change takes repetition. Email hello@algorithms.technology and we will tell you when the department responds, when the GIPA documents arrive, and when the audit is re-run to show whether anything has moved.