The policy is written centrally. So is the fix.
Nothing here asks you to argue with your school. A principal following departmental policy is not the problem, and a single school changing its settings fixes one page out of 1,780. The instruction comes from the NSW Department of Education, and that is where the pressure has to land.
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. 89 of the 531 postcodes with a government school span more than one electorate, and where yours does you will be asked to choose.
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. Member names and electorate office email addresses were taken from each member's official profile page on parliament.nsw.gov.au on 4 August 2026. No address is generated from a 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 that it be updated.
Ministerial contact form
Electorate office: londonderry@parliament.nsw.gov.au
Murat Dizdar PSM
Secretary, NSW Department of Education. Departmental procedures and the Permission to Publish form are administered under his authority. 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 found 1,780 of them, serving 637,818 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. School Facebook accounts are created by the department's social media team and centrally linked to the department's Business Manager, so the department can change the standard once instead of leaving 1,780 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.
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 1,780 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 found that 1,780 schools, serving 637,818 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 is a federal regulator published a week ago and it 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 material is often published anonymously and off-platform, so a school usually learns 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, we have been told that schools are encouraged in practice to post actively and often, and that photographs of children enjoying school are treated 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 imagery from a school has been misused
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.
Accounts go 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 both primary documents are quoted with links. Everything for media is here.
Subscribe, so the pressure does not stop at one letter
Policy change takes repetition. 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.
Follow the investigation
Get notified when the department responds, or when the policy changes.
Last reviewed: August 2026