A youth-led report from the Fogarty Foundation finds young Western Australians are using generative AI while also being critical. Now they want the adults in charge to catch up.

Somewhere in a Year 10 classroom in Western Australia, a student opens a chat window and asks it to explain a concept their teacher covered too quickly. A few suburbs away, another student does the same thing for an assignment they have not started. However, neither student has been taught the implications to their learning when doing this.

That disconnect is what a group of eight young people set out to interrogate and understand more clearly by becoming GenerationAI Youth Ambassadors for the Fogarty Foundation.

This work is one of three priorities in the Fogarty Foundation's strategic response to AI in WA schools. The others include AI literacy for educators and school leaders, delivered with Day of AI Australia, and building the evidence base, including this year's residency by University of Oxford researcher Dr Sara Ratner, hosted with the Forrest Research Foundation. All three grew out of the State of AI in WA Schools Forum at Curtin University in November 2025, which brought together more than 220 teachers and school and sector leaders from over 70 schools.

The report lands at a moment when schools are still working out what to do about a technology their students began using a number of years ago. Its argument is not that AI should be banned, nor that it should be embraced without question. It is that the people who will live longest with the consequences should have a say in the rules.

Their work has concluded in the GenerationAI: Youth Insights Paper, released today by the Fogarty Foundation. This piece of work on AI in WA schools was designed and led by the students who live with it. The numbers it produced are striking, but the story behind them is important: young people have accepted generative AI. What worries them is what it might be doing to their minds and the environment, and that there are no platforms for them to currently have these conversations with decision-makers.

Of the 236 young people aged 15 to 25 surveyed between late August and mid-September this year, 91.5% had used generative AI. More than half, 56%, were using it at least weekly for homework or study (it is how they get unstuck at 11pm!).

That familiarity comes with unease though, as 90.1% agreed that AI risks reducing young people's ability to think for themselves. Nearly three quarters, 73.7%, were uncomfortable with how AI tools collect, store, use or share their data. Read together, those figures describe something more complicated than enthusiasm or resistance. Young people are using the tools because they work, and doubting them because they can see the cost.

But the survey is only the surface of this report, and the deeper material is what young people said when they were given room to explain themselves. The research was not done to young people. It was done by them. Eight Youth Ambassadors aged 15 to 25 shaped the research themes, co-facilitated consultations, presented to decision-makers at roundtables and drafted the recommendations themselves. Alongside the survey, seven in-person group consultations were held across Western Australia, reaching more than 300 young people in total. It is in those conversations that the reasoning behind the percentages lives: the compromises students make, the workarounds they invent, the things they wish their teachers knew.

Alina Eshal, one of the ambassadors, said the project began with a gap she and her peers could feel. "We joined GenerationAI because other young people around us were worried about what AI means for their futures, and almost no one making decisions was asking us," she said.

What came back from the consultations was not vague anxiety but practical, specific thinking. "What we learned is that when young people are given a real voice, what they offer is specific and useful," Alina said. Her message to the adults reading the report is blunt. "Our recommendations are clear. It's time to move from talking about the problem to solving it. Many students are struggling right now, and they shouldn't have to wait."

Fellow ambassador Athanasios brought a focus on educational equity to the conversation. His concern is not whether AI belongs in schools, but who gets to use it well. "I have seen first-hand that the students who stand to gain the most from understanding generative AI are the ones currently getting the least," he said.

The reason, he argues, is that AI literacy in WA schools depends less on policy than on luck: which teacher happens to know the tools, which school happens to have the resources, which family happens to have the confidence to guide a child through them. "The education system is failing to set clear standards for AI literacy, leaving access to depend on the ability and resources of individual teachers and schools," Athanasios said.

The consequence is a familiar pattern with a new instrument. "Without structure and equitable access, AI that could be used to close the gap in education quality may instead deepen the one that already exists. As AI reshapes the future of work, those without critical skills are left starting the race from outside the stadium."

The report makes eleven recommendations to education sector leaders and decision-makers. They cluster around three ideas: a national AI literacy curriculum, so that understanding the technology is a right rather than a postcode lottery; assessment that rewards learning over output, so that students are not pushed towards tools that do the thinking for them; and regulation of AI companies, so that the data of young people is protected.

Eleven recommendations are a lot to reduce to a sentence, and the report does not try to. Each one is set out in full, with the reasoning, the evidence from the consultations and the specific changes young people are asking for. For anyone who makes decisions about schools, or who teaches in one, or who has a young person at the kitchen table every night, we encourage you to read the paper.

This project was facilitated by Paris McNeil, Founder and CEO of Thriving Futures Co and a 2026 Churchill Fellow.

The full GenerationAI: Youth Insights Paper is available from the Fogarty Foundation website at Generation AI Youth Ambassadors.