82% of NSW government schools operate public Facebook Pages
A Google search for a Facebook presence associated with every NSW government school. More than 1,750 operate public Pages. Over 600,000 students attend these schools each year.
Parents consented to sharing. Not to AI training.
Parents at NSW government schools sign a "Permission to Publish" form. It asks whether the school can share photos and work samples of their child on the school website, in newsletters, and on social media. Most parents say yes. They want to see their children celebrated.
That form does not mention AI training. It does not mention facial recognition databases. It does not mention deepfakes. It was written before any of those risks existed. It has not been updated for a world where every public Facebook post is scraped by Meta for AI model training, harvested by Clearview AI for facial recognition, and accessible to anyone building an AI training dataset.
The gap is not between parents and schools. It is between what the consent framework covers and what actually happens to publicly accessible photos in 2026.
1,780 schools. 637,818 students. One pattern.
This audit covers 2,160 of the 2,210 NSW government schools listed in the
NSW
Department of Education's public schools master dataset. For each school, Google was searched
for site:facebook.com "[School Name]". Every result was categorised by match quality.
| Category | Schools | % | Students |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official school page (claimed) | 1,780 | 82.4% | 637,818 |
| Auto-generated page (unclaimed) | 237 | 11.0% | 58,879 |
| P&C / parent association page | 91 | 4.2% | 34,028 |
| Alumni or historical group | 12 | 0.6% | 6,996 |
| False positive | 35 | 1.6% | 9,573 |
| Weak/uncertain match | 5 | 0.2% | 4,101 |
The conservative figure is reported here: 1,780 schools (82%). This counts only school-managed Pages where the school name matches the Facebook page title. Including auto-generated pages (still publicly indexed, still accessible to scrapers) takes the total to 2,017 schools (93%). The primary stat understates rather than overstates the finding.
91 schools matched only a P&C or parent association page. P&C pages do not typically publish student photos. They are excluded from the 1,780 count and the 637,818 student figure.
Secondary schools are most exposed. Schools for Specific Purposes are not spared.
| School type | Total | Public Pages | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary School | 1,532 | 1,228 | 80% |
| Secondary School | 408 | 367 | 90% |
| Central/Community School | 65 | 59 | 91% |
| Environmental Education Centre | 22 | 21 | 95% |
| Schools for Specific Purposes | 117 | 93 | 79% |
| Infants School | 14 | 10 | 71% |
93 Schools for Specific Purposes operate public Facebook Pages. These schools serve 5,207 students with disabilities and additional needs. Their photos are publicly accessible under the same consent framework that does not mention AI.
83% metro. 81% regional. 82% outer regional. The pattern is statewide.
This is not a city problem or a country problem. The pattern holds across every remoteness classification in NSW.
| Remoteness | Schools with Pages | % |
|---|---|---|
| Major Cities | 1,005 / 1,205 | 83% |
| Inner Regional | 491 / 603 | 81% |
| Outer Regional | 247 / 302 | 82% |
| Remote | 23 / 35 | 66% |
| Very Remote | 14 / 15 | 93% |
The consistency is the point. When 82% of schools follow the same pattern regardless of where they are, the cause is not individual decisions. It is the system working as designed. NSW Department of Education policy PD-2011-0418 governs school social media use. It was written in 2011.
Top 10 local government areas by student count
| LGA | Schools | Students |
|---|---|---|
| Blacktown | 66 | 38,221 |
| Central Coast | 65 | 29,321 |
| Canterbury-Bankstown | 65 | 28,341 |
| Fairfield | 38 | 23,160 |
| Liverpool | 43 | 22,739 |
| Sutherland | 51 | 21,851 |
| Campbelltown | 45 | 20,302 |
| Lake Macquarie | 57 | 19,399 |
| Penrith | 34 | 18,702 |
| Northern Beaches | 37 | 18,653 |
These are the Pages that Meta confirmed it scrapes for AI training
A public Facebook Page is not just visible to parents. It is visible to everyone on the internet. It is indexed by search engines. And it is accessible to automated systems that collect data at scale.
The evidence for what happens to content on public Facebook Pages is documented across this site:
- Meta AI training. Meta confirmed under oath to the Australian Senate that it scrapes every public post since 2007. Children's photos on school Pages are included. Australians have no opt-out.
- Facial recognition. Clearview AI scraped 50 billion+ photos from Facebook for facial recognition. The Australian Information Commissioner found it breached the Privacy Act. The database grew after the deletion order.
- Training datasets. Human Rights Watch found 362 identifiable Australian children in a single AI training dataset, from less than 0.0001% of the data. Some photos came from school uploads.
- Deepfakes. AI-generated explicit images of 50+ schoolgirls at a Melbourne school were created from publicly accessible photos. Deepfake reports to the eSafety Commissioner are doubling year on year.
1,780 NSW government schools operate the kind of public Facebook Pages that these systems draw from. 637,818 students attend these schools. The consent forms their parents signed do not mention any of these uses.
Schools are not at fault. The framework hasn't been updated for AI.
NSW Department of Education policy PD-2011-0418 governs how schools use social media. The policy states that school Facebook accounts "must not restrict access or be set as 'private' or 'closed'." Schools are following the rules.
The policy was written in 2011. Before Meta confirmed it uses public posts for AI training (2024). Before Clearview AI built a 50 billion photo facial recognition database from Facebook. Before 362 Australian children were found in an AI training dataset (2024). Before AI-generated explicit images of schoolgirls were created from their publicly accessible photos (2024).
The result: 82% of schools follow the same pattern. Public Pages, not private Groups. This is not individual decisions. It is what the system produces.
PD-2011-0418 is a departmental policy, not legislation. It can be updated by the NSW Department of Education without an act of parliament. Update the policy to allow or require private settings. Update the Permission to Publish form to disclose AI risks and offer granular consent. Issue guidance to schools on the current threat landscape.
Approximately 100 NSW schools already use private Groups
These schools communicate with their communities through private, member-approved channels. Parents request to join. Content is visible only to members. Search engines do not index it. Third-party scrapers cannot access it.
The transition from a public Page to a private Group is free. It takes less than an hour. No technical barrier prevents any school from making the same change. Schools that have already moved report no loss of parent engagement.
Third-party scraping (Clearview AI, dataset builders), search engine indexing, and unrestricted public access. It does not stop Meta's own AI training practices for content within its platform. But it eliminates the broadest attack surface: any person or system on the internet accessing every photo of every child.
How this was done, so anyone can verify it
Data source
NSW government school master dataset from Data.NSW. Published by the NSW Department of Education. 2,210 schools total. 2,160 processed (50 excluded by batch sizing, randomly distributed across school types, does not affect proportional findings). Dataset dated 15 April 2026.
Search method
For each school, Google was searched for site:facebook.com "[School Name]" using the
Apify Google Search Results Scraper. Schools were processed in 44 batches of 50. Top 5 Google
results returned per query. Facebook page URLs extracted from results and classified as Page or Group.
QA methodology
Every result was programmatically categorised by:
- Name overlap scoring. Distinctive words from the school name checked against the Facebook page title. Common words excluded (public, school, high, nsw). Zero overlap = false positive. Under 50% = weak match.
- P&C detection. Title containing "P&C", "P and C", "Parents and Citizens", or "P & C".
- Alumni detection. Title containing year ranges, "alumni", "old boys/girls", "reunion", "past students".
- URL pattern analysis.
facebook.com/p/and numeric IDs flagged as auto-generated (Facebook creates these from location data; school may not manage them).
A stratified random sample of 30 results was manually reviewed against Google search results. 90% confirmed correct matches. 7% P&C or community pages. 3% false positives.
Limitations
- Google's index may miss some Facebook pages. These figures are a floor estimate.
- The "auto-generated" category (11%) may include actively managed pages with non-standard URL formats. The true school-managed count may be higher than 82%.
- Search results alone cannot determine whether a school actively posts student photos. Sharing school news and events, which inherently involves student content, is the stated purpose of most school Pages.
- Some P&C pages may not include identifying keywords and could be miscategorised as official pages. This would slightly overstate the conservative figure.
- 50 schools (of 2,210) were not processed due to batch sizing.
What this audit did not do
- No content from any Facebook page was accessed, viewed, downloaded, or scraped.
- No photos of children were viewed or downloaded.
- All data comes from Google's public search index.
- The search query
site:facebook.comreturns only pages that are publicly indexed, confirming public accessibility by definition.
This is a deliberate constraint. The research demonstrates that these Pages are publicly accessible without requiring anyone to access a single photo. The same Google search that produced these results is available to anyone, including the automated systems documented in the evidence pages.
The audit is fully reproducible
The school dataset is publicly available from Data.NSW. The audit methodology is described in full above. Anyone can run the same Google searches and verify the results.
This audit will be re-run quarterly to track whether schools move from public Pages to private Groups over time.
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The data is clear. The policy can be updated. Schools can act now.
Every school that moves to a private Group is one less source of publicly accessible children's photos. Every P&C that passes a motion builds the case for policy change.
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Get notified when new evidence emerges or policy changes.
Audit conducted 16 April 2026. All data sourced from Data.NSW and Google's public search index.