AI Use Policy - Schoolzine

1. Our position on AI

We use artificial intelligence in a small number of specific, bounded ways to make our products more useful to schools and their communities. We do not use AI to make decisions about people, to profile individuals, or to analyse behaviour.

Our approach rests on five commitments:

Bounded use. AI performs defined processing tasks. It does not make autonomous decisions.
Human oversight. AI outputs support human judgement. They are not treated as a source of truth.
Data minimisation. Only the content necessary for the task is processed.
No training on your data. Customer data is never used to train, fine-tune or improve any AI model.
Australian processing. AI processing for our content-safety features occurs within Australia.

2. Where we use AI

Feature	What the AI does	What it does not do
Image Guardian	Detects the presence and number of faces in an image, to help schools identify images requiring consent review	Does not perform facial recognition, biometric matching or identification. Does not generate or store biometric templates. Does not compare faces against any database. Does not use data for training purposes.
EduTranslate	Translates communication content into another language	Does not analyse, profile or retain content beyond the translation task
Eduvoice	Converts written communication content into audio	Does not analyse, profile or retain content beyond the synthesis task

These features process content that a school has provided or published. They do not process content from outside your account.

3. Opt-in

AI-assisted features are opt-in. They are not enabled by default. A school chooses whether to enable them, and can disable them at any time.

Where a feature involves a new category of data handling, it requires an express opt-in by an authorised person in the school or organisation.

4. How your data is handled

Processing location. AI processing for Image Guardian occurs using Amazon Rekognition within Amazon Web Services, in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region, under an account controlled by Schoolzine.

Subprocessors. The AI providers we use are listed in the subprocessor table in our Privacy Policy. We do not introduce undisclosed third parties into AI processing.

No training. Customer data is not used to train, fine-tune, retrain or improve any AI model — ours or a provider’s. Where a provider offers a training opt-out, we exercise it and retain evidence of that configuration.

Retention. Content submitted to AI services is processed transiently and is not retained by those services once a result is returned. Outputs and audit records are held within the school’s account, as described in our Privacy Policy.

Minimisation and protection. Only the content necessary for the task is submitted. Where content is sent for translation or speech synthesis, personal identifiers and dynamic values may be tokenised or masked before processing and reinstated afterwards.

5. Accuracy and human oversight

AI outputs are probabilistic. They can be incomplete or wrong.

Outputs are provided to support human decision-making and must not be the sole basis for a decision affecting a student, staff member or community member.
Content-safety features are assistive controls. They support, but do not replace, a school’s own policies, staff review, consent management and child-safety obligations.
Translation and speech outputs are validated through post-processing checks, including reinstatement of protected data, terminology consistency, and integrity checks on dates, numbers and names.
Schools can report issues with AI output to us, and those reports feed into our glossary and rule improvements.

6. Our staff

Our staff operate under an internal AI governance policy that forms part of our ISO/IEC 27001 certified information security management system. It requires that:

customer data is not entered into any AI tool that has not been assessed and approved by us;
public or consumer AI tools must not be used with customer data, confidential information or credentials;
AI-generated output used in our work is reviewed by a person before it is relied on;
staff complete periodic training on responsible AI use.

Access to AI services and to the data processed by them is logged and auditable.

7. Governance and change control

AI providers and endpoints are documented, risk-assessed and approved before use.
Adopting a new AI provider, changing to a model that materially alters output, or changing how AI processing flows through our systems requires formal review and approval.
AI use is reviewed periodically for security risk, accuracy, and regulatory compliance.

If we materially change how AI services process customer data — including the processing location, the categories of data processed, or the no-onward-disclosure and no-training positions above — we will notify affected customers at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and the affected feature can be disabled without penalty.

8. What we do not do

To be explicit, we do not:

use AI to make automated decisions about individuals;
profile students, staff or parents;
perform facial recognition or biometric identification;
use customer data to train AI models;
send customer data to AI providers not listed in our Privacy Policy;
use AI to generate content that is published to a school community without a person reviewing it.
send sensitive data to large offshore companies to train their models

9. Questions and concerns

Contact support@schoolzine.com or dpo@schoolzine.com, or call 1300 795 503.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Where a change is material we will give notice in accordance with clause 22.2 of our Terms and Conditions.