Once a student's photo is online, your school no longer controls where it ends up.
Schools love to post photos of actual students on social media and their website — and why not? Families enjoy seeing updates about their child, with pictures of the classroom, school trips or sports day included. A picture says a thousand words.
But in the age of AI, both families and school leaders alike are increasingly concerned about how safe it is to post a student's photo online.
And there is merit to that concern: the Human Rights Watch has documented cases where children's personal photos — including school and family images — were scraped into datasets used to train image-generation models. The majority of these photos were used without the family's knowledge or consent.
Other risks include the potential to identify specific children by connecting their photo to the name of their school and location, along with the potential for unwanted contact, uncontrolled use and distribution.
Photos of real students on school websites and social media are very common. According to TeacherTapp, 85 per cent of primary schools share photos of real students on their website, along with nine in 10 secondary schools.
Over a quarter of primary schools and one in five secondaries say they plan to change their image sharing policies in the future, but the majority said there were no plans to change it in 2026.
But experts are now saying that the safeguarding risks posed by public photos are urgent, and schools need to act now rather than later.
The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) recently recommended that schools remove identifying photos of children from websites and social media. The recommendation came after the Internet Watch Foundation said an anonymous UK school had been subjected to a blackmail attempt using photos of real students posted on the school website.
Meanwhile, a study by the University of Southampton found that both schools and parents alike often overestimate the protection that privacy settings on social media offered.
"Features like tagging and resharing can bypass [privacy settings], allowing content to spread beyond the intended audience even from 'private' accounts."
Schools and families are right to be concerned about the safety and privacy issues surrounding posting photos on social media or a school's website.
But does that mean schools cannot share photos of students, classrooms or events at all?
Families still want to see updates on their child's school life, including photos. Schools still want to share what's going on.
Privacy settings on social media cannot fully protect images from spreading, thanks to built-in features like resharing. However, perhaps there is another, safer way for schools to share photos with families.
Guidance from the UK Online Harms Early Warning Working Group, created with input from organisations like the NSPCC and the Internet Watch Foundation, suggests limiting images of students to closed groups, rather than public platforms.
Some platforms can even mimic the look and feel of social media, without the public-facing risks — such as ReachMoreParents' Newsfeed, which comes with the option to allow likes and comments from parents.
There are multiple benefits to closed groups like this:
No scraping: Public posts can be pulled by anyone — a bot, a scraper, a stranger — with no way for the school to know it happened. A closed platform removes that opportunity almost entirely, since there's no public URL for a scraper to find.
Consent stays meaningful: A parent who agrees to photos being shared with other school parents is agreeing to something specific, with clear boundaries. A parent who agrees to photos appearing on "the school website" is not necessarily agreeing to those photos then being taken and used elsewhere by people outside of the school.
Families stay in the loop: The appeal of school photos was never that strangers could see them, it was that families could. A closed platform keeps that experience intact while removing the audience no one actually wanted in the first place.
Once a student's photo is online, your school no longer controls where it ends up. That's not a reason to stop celebrating school life, it's a reason to be deliberate about who gets to see it.
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