Smart glasses have officially joined phones on the list of things that stay in the bag at school. On October 21, the government of Victoria in Australia announced that smart glasses will be banned in every school in the state, government, Catholic and independent, from the start of the 2027 school year.
“Smart glasses have no place in our classrooms or on school grounds,” said Deputy Premier and Education Minister Gabrielle Williams.
What the rules say
The ban is set out in a new ministerial order, which takes effect on January 28, 2027. It extends Victoria’s existing school phone ban to smart glasses. Students will have to switch their glasses off during school hours and store them so they can’t get to them.
At government schools, the rules go further. They apply to students, staff, parents, carers, contractors, volunteers and visitors, at all times and at school events, on or off school grounds. Visitors who won’t remove their glasses can be asked to leave. The government’s reasoning is that smart glasses “can film people and their surroundings without their knowledge or consent.”
For now, the adult rules don’t apply at Catholic and independent schools. The government says it would extend them through legislation if re-elected at the state election on November 28.
A definition that reaches further than you’d think
The most interesting detail is in the wording. The order defines smart glasses as any device “designed to be worn as spectacles” that can “send, receive, store, record or process digital information.”
That doesn’t require a camera. As XR news site VR.org pointed out, it could cover camera-free audio glasses, and even hearing aids built into frames. The order explicitly excludes assistive hearing devices in its wider category of wearables, but the smart-glasses section has no matching exclusion.
The exemption question
There is one exemption: a “reasonable adjustment for a student with disability,” and only where no other device or approach would do the job. A student with prescription smart glasses may need a second, ordinary pair for school hours. Victoria’s education department says it will publish detailed exemption guidance before the end of this year.
That guidance will matter a great deal. Earlier this month we wrote about blind and deaf people who rely on smart glasses for reading, captions and getting around. A narrow exemption, applied cautiously by busy schools, could leave some of those students worse off.
Part of a bigger pattern
Victoria isn’t the first to act. Western Australia already bans smart glasses in public schools, including for parents. But Victoria’s ban covers every type of school from day one. And it comes in the same week that South Korea’s exam authorities warned students against bringing smart glasses to the national university entrance exam, after AI-glasses cheating cases at two top universities.
Our take
We understand why schools want this. Glasses that can film quietly are a real privacy problem in a place full of children, and the cheating risk is clearly no longer hypothetical.
But this is the first big ban written around smart glasses as a category, and the wording sets a precedent. A definition broad enough to cover camera-free and hearing-assist glasses, with an exemption that’s still to be fully explained, is exactly where a sensible rule can go wrong. Other schools and governments will be watching Victoria. We hope the guidance published later this year protects privacy without shutting out the students who need these glasses the most.