Q Platform for Education
A governed AI platform for educators, students and staff across your institution.
Q Platform gives your whole institution purpose-built AI agents that are grounded in your approved content, pre-configured with your rules, and running entirely inside your own Microsoft Azure environment. Nobody has to become a prompt engineer.
One platform for teaching, learning and your entire institution.
Most institutions we talk to have the same picture: a handful of enthusiastic teachers on ChatGPT, a Copilot pilot somewhere in IT, a student services team fielding the same questions every week, and no single view of what AI is being used for or what data it is touching. Every new tool adds another licence, another policy and another risk conversation.
Q Platform replaces that patchwork with one governed platform. It lets you deploy purpose-built AI agents for teaching, learning, student support and institutional operations. Each agent is grounded in your approved curriculum, policies, systems and knowledge, and comes pre-configured with behaviours, formatting rules and guardrails. Staff and students ask for what they need in plain language; the agent already knows how your institution works.
Every interaction stays inside your controlled Microsoft Azure environment, so the answers are accurate, consistent and governed, and your data never leaves your tenancy.
Teaching
Lesson plans, activity ideas, differentiated resources and assessment tasks, produced in your formats and mapped to your outcomes.
Learning
Student-facing agents restricted to curriculum-aligned content, with age-appropriate behaviours and safe language settings.
Student support
Instant, consistent answers on enrolment, timetables, wellbeing services and campus procedures, available around the clock.
Operations
Policy search, reporting, HR and finance procedures, and administrative workflows for staff across faculties, campuses and departments.
Illustrative example. The agent is grounded in your syllabus, year-level expectations, assessment standards and approved lesson structures, so nothing here has to be typed into a prompt.
An education AI tool that doesn’t feel like an AI tool.
With Q Platform, teachers don’t need to upload curriculum documents, build prompt libraries or explain formatting rules. The agent already understands your syllabus, year-level expectations, learning outcomes, assessment standards and school-approved lesson structures. A teacher simply asks for a lesson plan, an activity idea or an assessment task, and the agent produces it in the correct format, aligned to the right year level, mapped to the right outcomes and written in your institution’s preferred style.
- Pre-configured agents. Behaviours, formatting rules and guardrails are set once by your institution, not by every user.
- Your templates and standards. Output lands in the lesson plan, report or rubric format you already use.
- Where staff already work. Delivered through Microsoft Teams and the web inside your Microsoft environment.
Where Q Platform fits in your institution.
The challenges look different in a 40,000-student university and a single-campus K–12 school, and the agents you start with should reflect that. These are the three most common starting points we see.
Higher Education
Improve student support, simplify access to institutional knowledge and reduce administrative pressure across faculties, student services and academic teams at your university or TAFE, across all campuses.
K–12 Schools
Give teachers time back, improve consistency across lesson planning, marking and reporting, and provide safer AI support for staff and students. Agents operate on your school’s approved curriculum, policies and procedures.
AI for Teachers
Focused AI assistants for lesson planning, assessment design, marking support, report writing, policy search and student insights, all grounded in approved institutional content and deployed safely inside your Microsoft environment.
AI grounded in your education content.
A general-purpose AI model will happily write a lesson plan. It will also happily invent a policy, cite a rubric that doesn’t exist, or answer a student’s question about assessment extensions from a school on another continent. In education, a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer.
Q Platform agents retrieve information only from the sources your institution approves. That includes curriculum documents, LMS content, course materials, policies, rubrics, SharePoint libraries and institutional knowledge bases. Answers are drawn from your material and cite it, so staff can check the source. The result is accurate, consistent and aligned with your teaching, learning and operational requirements, rather than with whatever the open internet happened to say.
When your content changes, the agents change with it. Update a policy in SharePoint or a unit outline in your LMS and the next answer reflects it.
Approved sources your agents can draw on
Each agent is scoped to the sources appropriate to its audience. A student agent and a staff agent can sit on the same platform without ever seeing the same content.
Governance, safety and data protection built for education.
Schools and universities carry a duty of care greater than most organisations. Student records, wellbeing notes, learning support plans and assessment data all end up in the questions staff want to ask an AI. If those prompts leave your environment, you have a privacy problem before you have a productivity gain.
Q Platform runs entirely within your Microsoft Azure environment, keeping all data, prompts and outputs under your institution’s controls, permissions and governance policies. Every agent operates under strict policy enforcement, safety settings and model controls. You decide which large language models are approved, what content each agent can access and how each agent behaves with each audience.
Every prompt, response and grounding source is audited. That gives your leadership, IT and compliance teams detailed records and full traceability, and a straightforward answer when a parent, council or regulator asks how AI is being used.
Cost effective AI for your whole institution.
The maths on per-user AI licensing rarely works for education. Multiply a monthly seat price by every teacher, every professional staff member and potentially every student, and the number quickly outgrows the benefit. So institutions ration access, which means the people who would gain the most, often the ones furthest from IT, never get it.
Q Platform takes a different model. Instead of paying for separate AI tools for teachers, staff and students, you run one governed platform with institution-wide agents that scale across faculties, campuses and departments. Pricing is based on deployment scope, the number of agents and integration requirements, not on how many people use it. That lowers the cost per user as adoption grows, simplifies budgeting and lets AI investment deliver value across teaching, learning and operations rather than in one pilot group.
What the model changes
- No per-student or per-staff licencesExtend an agent to a new cohort or campus without a new procurement round.
- One platform to governOne set of policies, one audit trail and one place to approve models and sources, instead of a tool-by-tool review.
- Runs on your existing Azure commitmentConsumption sits inside the Microsoft agreement you already hold, alongside Microsoft 365 and your data platform.
- Start small, expand deliberatelyMost institutions begin with one or two high-value agents and add more as usage data shows where the demand is.
How Haileybury deployed a secure AI platform across 150+ staff.
Haileybury, one of Australia’s largest independent schools, wanted staff to use AI for real work without student and school data leaving its control. Haileybury partnered with Antares to deploy a secure AI capability embedded within the school’s Microsoft environment.
Staff now use AI confidently across policy search, curriculum design, reporting and daily administration, saving up to 10 hours a week while maintaining full data control.
- 150+Staff on the platform
- Up to 10 hrsSaved per staff member, per week
- 100%Data inside Haileybury’s Microsoft environment
How Q Platform for Education differs from Copilot and ChatGPT.
Many education institutions use a mix of AI tools, and that is usually the right answer. Copilot supports individual productivity inside Microsoft 365. ChatGPT is useful for general brainstorming and experimentation. Q Platform provides governed, institution-specific AI agents grounded in approved curriculum, policies and systems, and unlike Copilot or ChatGPT, it doesn’t require staff or students to be prompt engineers.
| Capability | ChatGPT / OpenAI | Microsoft Copilot | Q Platform for Educationby Antares |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | General-purpose AI for writing, ideation and developer-led integrations | Personal productivity inside Microsoft 365 | Governed AI agents for education institutions |
| Best suited for | Drafting, brainstorming, coding help, experimentation | Summaries, writing, meeting notes, task support | Teaching, learning, student support, operations |
| Ease of use | Requires prompt engineering and manual instructions | Requires prompting skill for best results | Pre-configured agents with built-in instructions, behaviours and approved sources. No prompt engineering required. |
| Grounded answers | Public data unless integrated with private sources | Limited grounding via Microsoft Graph | Approved curriculum, policies, LMS, SIS and institutional content |
| Governance and compliance | Varies by deployment (OpenAI vs Azure OpenAI) | Microsoft 365 audit logs and Microsoft guardrails | Full audit logs, role-based access, model controls and institution-defined guardrails |
| Personas | Possible with custom development | Single assistant | Multiple agents for students, teachers and staff, out of the box |
| System integrations | Possible via APIs and custom development | Microsoft 365 apps | LMS, SIS, CRM, ERP, SharePoint and institutional APIs |
| Model flexibility | OpenAI models (plus others via Azure OpenAI) | OpenAI and Anthropic | Any model available in Azure AI Foundry |
In practice, most institutions we work with keep Copilot for personal productivity and run Q Platform alongside it for governed, institution-specific agents. The two are complementary rather than competing, and Q Platform sits on the same Azure and Microsoft 365 foundation.
Expertise in Microsoft, AI and the education sector.
Antares has been delivering large-scale AI solutions for education institutions since 2017, starting with QBot at UNSW, the project that became Q Platform. Since then we’ve helped many of Australia’s most recognisable schools, universities and TAFEs modernise their data, AI, applications and Microsoft 365 environments. That experience spans the rollout of institution-wide AI agents and secure Azure deployments, through to LMS integrations, student support automation, Microsoft Fabric analytics, SharePoint intranets, Teams governance and more.
See Q Platform working on your curriculum, not a demo dataset.
Tell us a little about your institution and the first one or two agents you have in mind. We’ll come back within a business day to arrange a demo, and where it makes sense, we can ground it in a sample of your own curriculum or policy content so you see exactly what your teachers would.
- A 45-minute demo with someone who has deployed this in a school or university
- A straight answer on where Q Platform fits alongside your existing Copilot licences
- An indicative scope and timeline for a first deployment, typically a few weeks
FAQs about Q Platform for Education.
No. Q Platform runs entirely inside your institution’s Microsoft Azure environment. All prompts, responses, grounding sources and agent actions stay within your tenancy under your security, permissions and governance policies.
Yes. Q Platform enforces institution-controlled guardrails, approved knowledge sources and role-based access. Student-facing agents can be restricted to curriculum-aligned content, safe language settings and age-appropriate behaviours.
Copilot supports individual productivity inside Microsoft 365. Q Platform provides institution-specific AI agents grounded in approved curriculum, policies, LMS and SIS content and operational systems. Most education institutions run both: Copilot for personal productivity, Q Platform for governed education AI agents and chatbots.
Yes. Q Platform integrates with LMS platforms (Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard), SIS systems, SharePoint, CRM and ERP platforms and custom APIs. This allows agents to retrieve approved content and support workflows across teaching, learning and administration.
With Q Platform, you choose the approved knowledge sources, including curriculum documents, LMS content, policies, rubrics, intranet libraries, operational procedures and more. Agents only retrieve information from these sources, never from the open internet.
Yes, when the AI runs inside your own environment, as Q Platform for Education does. Because Q Platform runs inside your Microsoft tenancy, staff can include contextual student information without exposing data externally. Role-based access ensures only authorised staff can use sensitive information.
Most institutions deploy Q Platform in a few weeks. Timelines depend on the number of agents, the state of your content sources and the complexity of integrations. Many schools and universities begin with one or two high-value agents and expand from there.
No. Q Platform is designed to give teachers time back, not replace them. It supports lesson planning, curriculum differentiation, reporting, policy search and administrative tasks so teachers can focus on the work that needs a teacher.
Yes. Q Platform supports multi-campus universities, school networks and federated environments. Each campus or school can have its own agents, approved content and governance settings, all managed centrally.
Q Platform supports any model available in Azure AI Foundry, including OpenAI, Anthropic Claude and Meta Llama. Institutions choose which models are approved, and Q Platform enforces those choices through governance controls.
Pricing is based on deployment scope, number of agents and integration requirements. Q Platform is designed to scale across your entire institution without per-student or per-staff licensing costs. Contact us for a quote