Guidelines for Generative AI use in Schools

April 2026, Leon Furze

In October 2023, the Victorian ICT Network for Education (VINE) published its first set of Generative AI (GenAI) guidelines for schools. ChatGPT was less than a year old. Schools were caught between panic and possibility, trying to decide whether to ban the technology or adopt it. The guidelines, written for a fictional “VINE School” and published under a Creative Commons license, gave member schools a shared starting point: a template they could adapt, a set of principles they could argue from, and a collection of practical strategies they could use on Monday morning.

Three years is a long time in AI. By early 2026, it was clear the 2023 document had done its job and that its job had changed.

An extended article documenting the process used to formulate the updated 2026 VINE Generative AI Guidelines can be found here.

The 2026 Guidelines

While the core commitment – practical, principles-based guidance written for a fictional “VINE School” that real schools can adapt – remains the same, the 2026 guidelines are a substantially different document from their 2023 predecessor. The purpose of the 2026 Guidelines is to be an aspirational document. We don’t expect every school to be able to adopt every suggestion or guiding statement, but we offer these statements as an indication of what member schools told us they would like to achieve with AI. This idea of aspirational guidelines resonated with many members:

“An incoming tide raises all boats in the port. If a school does take it on, it is going to up the general baseline.” — Digital learning leader

“Having [the guidelines] as a benchmark to always reach forwards to… even areas where we haven’t quite hit that target… having that as a benchmark I think is super useful.” — AI learning specialist

“It’s about levelling the field, and as a sector, as Victorian schools, to be growing together in this space.” — Director of learning technologies

We have updated these aspirational guidelines as follows:

From strategies to tools. The 2023 document included “practical strategies for schools”. The 2026 version replaced these with concrete, ready-to-deploy tools: an assessment design checklist, a cognitive offloading discussion toolkit, a deepfake response protocol, an AI tool vetting checklist, a shadow AI audit template, educational chatbot design principles, and an AI meeting recording policy template, among others.

From permissions to principles. The 2023 document was, unavoidably, a document about whether schools should allow GenAI. The 2026 version assumes that ship has sailed. The question is no longer whether to permit it but how to govern it across the whole school, not just the classroom.

A stakeholder map. The 2026 guidelines open with an acknowledgement that the document lands differently depending on who’s reading it. Ten distinct roles, from board directors to students, are mapped with their primary concerns and typical tensions.

Seven guiding principles. The principles anchor the entire document and give schools something to argue from when making specific decisions. They include “AI is a technology, not a teacher”, “Privacy is non-negotiable”, and “Critical thinking over compliance”.

A living document. At the explicit request of interviewees, the guidelines include a prominent call-out committing to regular review and suggesting a specific cadence: annual review, with a lighter-touch check each semester.

“We can’t just write it and forget it like we do with a lot of policies. It’s got to be realistic and realistically updated on a regular basis.” — ICT manager

The VINE School Guidelines for Generative AI (2026) are published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and are available through the VINE network.

Leon Furze is author of Practical AI Strategies, and author of the original 2023 VINE GenAI Guidelines. He holds a PhD in generative AI in education.