With exam season in full swing, many schools across Australia are turning to technology to help young people through this high-pressure time.
But while headlines often focus on students using tools like ChatGPT to cram, what’s missing from the conversation is how educators are using purpose-built, classroom-ready AI to make a meaningful difference to learning outcomes.
These tools aren’t shortcuts – they’re designed to personalise revision, highlight knowledge gaps, and make teachers’ jobs easier, not harder. It’s a quieter story, but one that’s making a real difference where it counts: in the classroom.
One expert who has seen this firsthand is James Santure, who taught in secondary schools for a decade before moving into the ed-tech industry six years ago. Today, Santure is the Head of Product Impact at Education Perfect, the largest education technology provider in Australia and New Zealand, serving over 1.8 million students and 50,000 teachers in more than 5,000 schools worldwide.
Pilot first, innovate later
According to Santure, schools should take “a cautious-but-curious” approach to AI to balance innovation with risk aversion.
“Educators should start by conducting a clear assessment of your school’s purpose and pedagogy, and then look at which AI tools meet those standards,” Santure told The Educator.
“When assessing new AI tools to introduce, educators need to ask: does it provide contextually relevant feedback for students? Is there an iterative loop where students can improve their work? Does it properly protect their data?”
Santure said innovation should not outpace trust.
“Start by piloting AI tools in a controlled way, monitor the results closely while engaging staff and students, and then scale when confidence is built,” he said. “Schools that balance this risk with a willingness to experiment are best placed to combine innovation with integrity.”
Tech that backs pedagogy, not shortcuts
Santure said EP’s intention is to build AI not as a replacement for teachers, but as a powerful collaborator – a “thought partner” helping spark ideas and free up precious time.
“According to a recent survey we conducted, nearly a third of teachers say they haven’t had enough training to deliver personalised, adaptive learning,” he said. “We need to back teachers with the tools they need to actually do their jobs without straining them further.”
Santure said one example of this is teachers using EP’s AI tool to generate curriculum-aligned questions and explanations from a simple prompt, which they can then review and refine.
“This means teachers can spend less time on repetitive content creation, and more energy on delivering the pedagogy they were trained to do,” he said.
Shifting the AI mindset in the classroom
Santure said one of the biggest challenges with bringing AI to schools is the perception that it will simply “give the answer” rather than encourage the process of thinking it through.
“At EP, we emphasise that AI should be a scaffold and a prompt to help students attempt, iterate and improve, rather than a shortcut to completion,” he said.
“We’ve already seen the benefits of AI tools in the classroom. The results from a trial of EP’s AI-powered ‘learning loop’ found it improved students’ final response quality by 47% on average, while 87% of students engaged with the AI to improve low-scoring responses.”
To create this mindset among students, schools should explicitly teach them how to use AI as a partner, Santure said.
“Build awareness and policies around using AI with integrity, and create tasks where AI’s output becomes the starting point for deeper thinking rather than the end.”
AI is reshaping the exam prep game
Santure said AI and ed-tech have gradually been moving exam preparation away from rote memorisation to a more personalised, strategic practice.
“Our AI-driven diagnostics and feedback tool can help identify individual knowledge gaps, deliver targeted practice aligned to the curriculum and adapt in real time to student progress,” he said. “Looking ahead, there are major opportunities for teachers to use AI during exam preparation season.”
One opportunity, said Santure, is using AI to generate realistic, varied exam-style questions on demand, and leveraging data analytics to forecast student readiness and inform teacher intervention.
“If done in the right way, the result will be more engaged students, less wasted time, and better outcomes for everyone.”