WA extends $A4.6m ClassmAIte AI lesson-planning pilot through 2027

The Western Australia government on Friday committed an additional $A4.6 million to extend ClassmAIte, the state’s school-sector artificial intelligence pilot, through to the end of 2027. Participation will lift past 100 schools by the close of 2026.

The funding sits in the 2026-27 state budget. Premier Roger Cook and Education Minister Sabine Winton announced it jointly. ClassmAIte gives teachers a generative AI tool that drafts lesson sequences, lesson plans and classroom resources, and offers a secure chat function with editable outputs. The pilot launched in July 2024 with seed money from the Workload Reduction Fund, a joint scheme of the Cook state government and the Albanese federal government.

Sixty schools currently use the platform across the state’s three school sectors. The Department of Education runs the pilot in partnership with Catholic Education Western Australia, the Association of Independent Schools of Western Australia and the School Curriculum and Standards Authority.

“WA ClassmAIte is a ground-breaking use of technology to significantly reduce the workload of teachers,” Cook said in a statement on 9 May 2026.

What ClassmAIte does

ClassmAIte is a productivity tool for teachers, not a teaching aid for students. The platform pairs a curriculum-aligned content generator with a chat workspace, and it is restricted to teacher accounts. According to the Department of Education, the tool can output multi-week lesson sequences, individual lesson plans, worksheets, slide decks and tailored materials for students with specialist learning needs.

The editable-output design keeps a teacher in the loop. System drafts are starting points. A teacher reviews and approves any material before it reaches a student. The state has not published the underlying model or vendor stack, and the Department of Education declined to name a commercial supplier when the pilot launched.

Why the Cook government is doubling down

Workload has been the dominant industrial issue for Australian state-school teachers over the past three years. The State School Teachers’ Union of WA has repeatedly flagged unsustainable hours on lesson planning, marking and reporting. Federal and state ministers responded in 2024 by establishing the Workload Reduction Fund and routing initial ClassmAIte funding through it.

Winton said early results from the pilot supported the extension. “The ClassmAIte pilot has seen strong early results, with teachers in participating schools benefiting from practical tools that reduce workload,” she said.

The state has not released outcome figures. No data has been published on average hours saved per teacher. No data has been published on attrition in pilot schools. No data has been published on student-outcome measures. Officials said an evaluation framework was in place and that further reporting would accompany the expansion.

Funding flow

The $A4.6 million is new state money. It tops up the federal contribution that seeded the July 2024 launch. The combined Workload Reduction Fund pays for cloud hosting, integration with school identity systems, teacher professional development, and the inference costs of generating drafts at scale.

Per-school and per-teacher unit costs were not disclosed. With participation set to grow from 60 to more than 100 schools, the new tranche works out to roughly $A45,000 per school over 18 months before any further federal contribution. Catholic and independent schools sit on the same operational footing as Department of Education sites.

National context

The expansion follows months of public-sector AI moves in Canberra. The federal National AI Centre platform launch earlier this year laid out central guidance for safe AI use in government agencies. State pilots have followed, weighted toward health and corporate services.

Education is behind. Most state education departments have run trials in around a dozen schools each, with patchy reporting on outcomes. WA’s plan to push past 100 schools through 2026 is the largest disclosed K-12 AI deployment in the country.

The federal 2026 Budget signalled an intention to fold school-sector AI into the broader research and development tax incentive review. ClassmAIte itself is funded out of recurrent appropriations, not the R&D envelope.

Risks

Reviewers outside the Department of Education have raised concerns. Data governance is one. A lesson-planning prompt can pull in student demographic, assessment and behavioural information, and the line between teacher-only metadata and personal data on minors is hard to police at scale.

There is also a skills question for new teachers. Some early-career staff may rely on AI drafts and skip the lesson-planning practice that builds craft. The long-run pedagogical effect of that has not been measured. Equity is the other recurring concern. Schools with better digital infrastructure tend to extract more productivity from this kind of tool than under-resourced regional and remote sites.

The Department of Education said ClassmAIte’s data handling runs inside government-controlled cloud infrastructure. No student personal information is meant to be entered into prompts. The expansion phase will be the first time the tool runs at scale across small, regional and remote schools, where bandwidth and device parity are weakest.

What’s next

A 2027 evaluation is the next reporting milestone. The Department of Education said it would draw on classroom observation data, teacher surveys and operational metrics from the platform. Cook and Winton said the government would consider further extensions, or a transition to ongoing funding, once that evaluation was delivered.