Data in Schools Melbourne 2026

Welcome to Data in Schools - Melbourne. Register at the sign in area to collect your lanyard and get ready for 2 days of learning and meeting your people.

Make Data Talk: Telling the Story of Student Growth and Impact: Welcome to Data in Schools Melbourne
Data in Schools conference organiser and founder, Chris Smith, provides the opening address. A brief overview of the conference format and structure, and introduction of the core themes to be explored in Melbourne.

Data in Schools warmly welcomes and thanks our event sponsors for helping to make this event possible. 

Dr. Geoff Masters AO, a prominent education scholar specialising in educational measurement and large-scale reform, kicks off 'Data in Schools - Melbourne' for a powerful keynote and whole-group workshop that challenges traditional views of assessment. Drawing on his extensive work as the former CEO of ACER and his expertise in the development of progressive achievement, Dr. Masters will guide the audience in defining the critical theme of progress, not just attainment.

Light refreshments and bites, prepared by our host Melbourne Connect

Dr. Anne-Marie Chase joins us for an essential, hands-on workshop on leveraging Generative AI to transform your assessment process. Taking the work out of creating valid, diagnostic quizzes explores how teachers can redesign quizzes to make learning visible in the age of generative AI. Moving beyond scores and performance, this session introduces a practical approach to creating diagnostically aligned quiz items and using Guttman analysis to reveal patterns of student understanding. Participants will experience a simple, repeatable workflow, from rubric to item design to analysis, and see how AI can ethically reduce workload while supporting, not replacing, teacher expertise. Expect hands-on activities and real-time data insights that show how quick quizzes can become powerful tools for responsive teaching and meaningful learning conversations.

Lunch Break

Most schools already hold the data they need to answer their hardest questions — about attendance, wellbeing, assessment, engagement, finance, operations... the list goes on. The trouble is that it lives across too many systems, in too many formats, to ask a straight question and get a straight answer. So the questions go unasked, or they get answered too late to be of any use.

In this session, we'll show what becomes possible when school data is brought together into a single governed foundation: you ask a real question about your school, in plain language, and get a useful answer grounded in your actual data — through the AI tools you already use. We'll also be honest about where the limits are, because a fluent answer isn't always a well-informed one. If you've got a question you've never quite been able to get a straight answer to, this is the session to bring it to.

Andy Sheu, Data in School's lead data analyst, breakdown the logistics for our first round of Workshops!

This presentation explores a practical and ethical approach to building AI agents that tracks student learning growth through curriculum and assessment data. It demonstrates how AI can synthesise targeted assessments to generate learning summaries and identify trends over time. Participants will explore how these insights support teachers to personalise instruction and design targeted lessons. During the workshop, participants will engage with a Kardinia case study and take part in hands‑on activities, including building and using their own AI agent with their school’s data.

This presentation explores the core technological processes of Business Intelligence and its evolution from Traditional BI to Agentic BI. Join us to see how data in education is evolving. We'll explore the shift from rigid, complex dashboards to simple, plain language tools and how we can still use both in education. Finally take a quick look under the hood at how CEnet is building this future.

Strategic alignment is a phrase that appears in most school improvement plans. What it rarely describes is a coherent chain of intent that runs from a school's vision all the way into an individual teacher's classroom and back out again through the eyes of their students.


This workshop presents a case study, where effort to embed reflexive professional practice has produced exactly that coherent chain. Beginning with the school strategic plan and a shared explicit teaching framework, the college designed a staff and student perception survey instrument deliberately mapped to its own definition of what good teaching looks like in a classroom. Survey questions were further refined through the lens of effective boys' education, grounding the data in the specific developmental needs of the young men the college serves.


The data is brought to life through a purpose-built dashboard that places the teacher at the centre. Rather than presenting scores, it poses questions: how do I see my own practice, how do my students experience it, and where do those two perspectives diverge? That gap, between teacher intention and student experience, is where the most powerful professional reflection happens, and it is the starting point for structured coaching conversations that feed directly into each teacher's Annual Review Meeting goal setting.


The result is a system where strategic intent, pedagogical framework, survey design, data infrastructure, coaching practice and individual professional goals all point at the same thing. Alignment is not a compliance mechanism here. It is the architecture of a school improvement culture built on genuine teacher inquiry.


Presented by the Director of Data Analytics and the Deputy Principal of Staff, this workshop will walk participants through the College's model, demonstrate the data infrastructure in practice, and invite schools to interrogate their own alignment chains: where the connection between strategy and classroom is strong, and where it quietly breaks down.

Schools are being asked to adopt AI faster than most feel ready for, and the gap is rarely the AI itself — it's the data behind it. AI is only as useful as the context it can see, and in most schools that context is scattered across the SIS, LMS, assessment, attendance and wellbeing systems, each governed differently. Connect AI to one slice and you get narrow answers; connect it to everything without proper controls and you create real risk around student data.

This hands-on workshop walks through what a practical data foundation for AI actually looks like in a K-12 setting: bringing data together without ripping and replacing the systems staff already rely on, applying role-aware access so the right people see the right things, and keeping your school in control of its own data and its choice of AI tools. It's built for the people who'll have to make this work — data teams, IT and operations leaders — and you'll leave with a clear sense of the steps, the decisions, and the questions to ask before connecting any AI tool to student data.

What can learning data tracked across a million assessments reveal about how children come to understand mathematics and misunderstand it? This session draws on longitudinal evidence from primary classrooms across Australia to explore the persistent misconceptions students carry, where they cluster within curriculum content threads, and the precise points at which understanding most often breaks down.


The same evidence is put to work at three levels: strategically, to inform school improvement planning; at the classroom level, to sharpen Tier 1 instruction; and at the individual level, to surface the prerequisite gaps that hold students back.


Attendees will gain insight into how this kind of evidence can be put to work at every level of a school and what becomes possible when longitudinal data is built into everyday assessment practice.

Enjoy a refreshment and bite to eat before rounding out Day 1 at Data in Schools.

Dr. Therese Hopfenbeck, Professor of Educational Assessment and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, closes Day at 'Data in Schools - Melbourne' for a timely keynote on the rapidly evolving role of Artificial Intelligence in education. Dr. Hopfenbeck's research sits at the intersection of data, digital technology, and teaching practice. In this session, she will address the critical question of how AI is disrupting traditional ideas about assessment, particularly in language learning.

Light refreshments and biteds to eat, thanks to our host Melbourne Connect