In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV writes: “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.” It is a fitting place to begin, because our response to artificial intelligence and learning has always rested on two of our College values; Conviction and Compassion.
Conviction
That question has taken on new urgency. The NSW Deputy Premier and Minister for Education, Prue Car, has written to the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) asking it to urgently consider a moratorium on unsupervised, take-home assessment tasks for the HSC, citing concerns about AI’s effect on students’ cognitive development and the integrity of school-based marks. It is a serious, well-intentioned response, and I understand why it has been proposed.
But I want to be clear about where Brigidine stands. Banning a technology is not, on its own, an education strategy. Moving every high-stakes assessment task back into a supervised room may address a detection problem, but it does not answer the deeper question our students face: how do you build genuine competence, judgement and mastery in a world where AI is now a permanent feature of the workplace they are walking into?
Matt Esterman, one of Australia’s most thoughtful voices on AI in schools, makes a point I keep returning to: students have always found ways to cheat. Copying a classmate’s homework, buying an essay, getting help from an older sibling, none of this is new. What AI has changed is the ease and the scale. That is a real problem, but it is a difference of degree, not an entirely new moral universe. It calls for better teaching, better pedagogy, and engaging and motivating our students to do their academic best, rather than simply banning these tools.
A ban on take-home tasks may buy time, but it does not teach a student how to use these tools with judgement or think critically once she leaves us. These are the tools and skills she will need at university, in the workplace and in a world where AI will simply be there.
A recent feature in the Sydney Morning Herald on the skills young Australians will need as AI reshapes graduate work made a similar point from the other direction: employers are not looking for graduates who can simply produce polished work, AI-assisted or otherwise. They are looking for judgement, the ability to interrogate an AI-generated answer, to know where it might be wrong, and to take responsibility for the decision that follows. Our conviction, then, is a clear one: competence in the responsible use of AI is now a genuine life skill, as fundamental to a young woman’s future as literacy or numeracy, and Brigidine’s task is to build it deliberately, not legislate it away.
Compassion
None of this works if it is only about capability. A learning culture, as distinct from a test-taking culture, must hold the whole young woman in view: her academic potential, her wellbeing and her readiness. Compassion means teaching her with patience rather than assessing her with distrust. It means trusting her enough to explain her reasoning rather than simply imposing a rule. Pope Leo’s caution against letting technology dominate the human person applies as much to how we treat our students inside this debate as it does to the technology itself.
Our Response
Strength and Gentleness asks us to hold conviction and compassion together, not to choose between them. As this conversation about AI and assessment continues to unfold across the state, I want our community to know that Brigidine will keep building a collaborative learning culture. We are committed to educating our students for the future and creating learning conditions and experiences so that all students can achieve their academic potential and are set up for future success. We are currently developing our Artificial Intelligence Statement and Framework for our College. Importantly, it is being co-designed with our students. I look forward to sharing it with you soon.
Mrs Kate Quinane
Principal
