EdChat — South Australia's Department-Run, Content-Filtered Generative-AI Chatbot for Public High Schools

The South Australian Department for Education built EdChat, a generative-AI chatbot hosted on Azure OpenAI with Azure AI Content Safety filters, so that students and staff could use AI without student data being used to train models.
An initial eight-week trial ran in eight government high schools; Microsoft's account puts the pilot at about 1,500 students and 150 teachers, with roughly 20% of students actively using the tool. Researchers collecting data from about 700 students and 90 teachers (reported by The Conversation, with the findings described as under peer review) found teachers valued time saved on lesson planning and preferred EdChat to ChatGPT for privacy reasons.
The same reporting records problems: hallucinations, students treating outputs uncritically, content filters that sometimes blocked legitimate history, health and politics topics, difficulty judging plagiarism, and teachers' questions about data storage. Researchers recommended more AI-literacy education, bias assessment and teacher professional development.
No learning-outcome measurements have been published; the evidence supports the safety and adoption case, not an impact claim. Rollout continued to public schools statewide.

Read the full analysis: https://www.education.sa.gov.au/parents-and-families/curriculum-and-learning/ai/edchat