In March 2026, New Zealand's parliament released one of the most important reports ever written about student safety online. The findings are serious. The good news is that schools can start protecting students right now, alongside the changes ahead.
Here is a number that should stop every school leader in their tracks.
New Zealand has the highest rate of school bullying in the entire OECD. One in seven students experiences frequent bullying. Cyberbullying significantly impacts the health, attendance, and learning of New Zealand students every single day.
These are not warnings about what might happen. This is what is happening right now, in schools across the country.
In March 2026, New Zealand's Education and Workforce Committee finished a major investigation into online harm. They spoke to 400 organisations and individuals, held 87 hearings, and gathered evidence from parents, young people, schools, and researchers. Their conclusion was clear: online harm to young New Zealanders is serious, it is widespread, and it needs urgent action.
The inquiry grouped online harm into four categories. Together they paint a full picture of the risks students face online every day.
Content harm is exposure to material students should never see, including violent content, pornography, and self-harm material, often delivered without students seeking it out. Contact harm covers being targeted directly through grooming, sexual exploitation, and catfishing. Conduct harm includes cyberbullying, sextortion, and AI-generated fake sexual images of real students. Commerce harm is the targeting of young people with advertising for alcohol, vaping, and gambling, sometimes disguised as peer content from influencers.
What makes all of this harder to address is that much of it is built into how online platforms work. Algorithms are designed to keep young people engaged for as long as possible. That is good for platform revenue, but it is not good for student wellbeing.
The parliamentary inquiry was honest about the state of New Zealand's existing laws. They are out of date and not working well enough.
Responsibility for responding to online harm is split across many different government agencies, with no single body coordinating the response. The inquiry made twelve recommendations to the Government, including creating a new national regulator, restricting social media access for under-16s, and banning AI tools used to create non-consensual sexual imagery.
The committee's recommendations are well-founded and necessary. The committee itself acknowledged, however, that establishing a new national regulator alone could take two to three years, with broader legislative reform requiring additional time to draft, consult on, and enact.
Schools have a duty of care today. Not in two years.
The inquiry identified several places where schools are particularly vulnerable right now.
Online harm is often invisible to adults until it becomes serious. Students rarely tell someone what is happening until they are already in crisis. Microsoft 365 tools like Teams, email, and OneDrive have become central to school life, yet many schools have little or no visibility into how students are using them privately. Cyberbullying that happens off school grounds is especially hard to detect. When students are on personal devices at home or in boarding houses, schools have almost no visibility into what is going on.
AI-generated harm, particularly fake sexual images created using "nudify" applications, is growing faster than laws can keep up. The inquiry called this an extreme harm that disproportionately targets girls.
And parents, despite wanting to help, are largely in the dark. The inquiry found that 93 percent of New Zealand parents report low awareness of how to reduce online harm for their children.
Saasyan Assure is an AI-powered safety platform built specifically for K-13 schools. It is already operating in New Zealand, and it directly addresses the gaps the parliamentary inquiry identified.
Assure does not just block websites. It watches for patterns of behaviour across the digital environments students use every day and alerts the right people when something looks wrong. Early. Before a situation becomes a crisis.
For schools already using the Palo Alto Networks firewall through N4L and the Ministry of Education, deployment is straightforward. Assure integrates directly with that existing infrastructure, adding AI-powered alerts, wellbeing monitoring, and K-13 reporting with no new hardware and no software to install on student devices.
Whanganui Collegiate School was the first school in New Zealand to integrate Assure with the Palo Alto firewall. With over 1,000 devices across day and boarding environments, the duty of care challenge is real and around the clock.
The results speak for themselves.
More than 930 schools globally trust Saasyan. More than 530,000 students are protected by Assure every day.
In Australia, the South Australian Department for Education deployed Assure statewide. The outcomes changed how an entire system thinks about student wellbeing online.
The parliamentary inquiry called for urgent action. Legislation and regulation will follow, but on a timeline measured in years. Students need protection now.
Getting started is straightforward. Request a live demonstration to see Assure work through common scenarios relevant to schools. For those ready to go further, a tailored pilot trial of Assure will generate real evidence to guide the next steps.