Schools have normalised the constant photographing and public broadcasting of other peoples children. Walk into any primary school and you'll find teachers with iPad's or phones, snapping photos of four-year-olds at the painting table, seven-year-olds reading aloud, ten-year-olds on the climbing frame. By home time, those images may already be circulating on Facebook, embedded in a class blog, or uploaded to a commercial app that pings notifications to parents' phones.
This isn't occasional documentation of special events. It's systematic, daily surveillance that creates detailed digital records of childhood, records that children themselves have no control over and often don't even know exist.
A Typical Week
On Monday, Year 2 arrives at school. Before the register is taken, their teacher has photographed the classroom display. By lunchtime, she's posted to the school's Facebook account: six children eating at a table, faces clearly visible, caption reading "Healthy eating week in Year 2! Well done Maya, Josh, and Priya! ๐" The post is public. It will be indexed by Google. It includes first names and shows school uniform with a visible badge.
On Tuesday, the same class uses Tapestry, an "online learning journey" platform used across thousands of early years and primary settings. Every time a child completes an activity, the teacher photographs them. Parents receive a push notification throughout the day: "Oliver has been learning about capacity in maths!" accompanied by a photo of Oliver pouring water between jugs, his face clearly visible, his name attached. The images are stored on commercial cloud servers. The company's privacy policy notes that data may be processed in the United States.
Wednesday brings a school trip to a local museum. The schools Facebook page shows the children getting on the coach., with a caption announcing "Year 2 heading to Transport museum today!" The post is Geo-tagged. It reveals, in real time, that twenty eight children are not at school, where they are instead, and approximately when they'll return. One child in the photo is not supposed to have any online presence, because her mother has fled domestic violence and specifically requested no images. She's in the background but clearly visible.
Thursday's class blog post includes photo's from a literacy lesson. Children have written poems about their families. The blog is publicly accessible, requiring no login and shows the poem in full. It has the children's first names and photos, one child has written about his dad being in prison. Another has mentioned her mum's "sad days" since her parents separated. The post remains online searchable, indefinitely.
Friday brings the weekly the newsletter, emailed to all parents and posted on the school website. It includes a "Star of the Week" section with the children's names. One parent opens it and feels a familiar knot in her stomach, because her daughter isn't mentioned again. She knows it doesn't mean anything, but she also knows her daughter will ask "Why do Eliza and Noah always get Star of the Week?" The pressure to have your child featured becomes another source of parental anxiety.
Where do children's images go?
Thousands of schools maintain active social media accounts, with primary schools amongst the most prolific posters. These accounts serve as public relations tools, celebration platforms, and recruitment marketing. Posts typically include:
-
Daily or weekly updates with photographs of children engaged in activities.
-
Achievement celebrations with named children
-
Event announcements (sometimes in advance, sometimes in real-time)
-
Trip documentation with location tags
-
Whole-class or group photos showing identifiable children in school uniform
The post are public by default. They appear in search results. They can be shared, screenshot, and re posted without limit. The schools rarely consider who might be looking at these images or for what purpose. The assumption is that everyone viewing these posts is a well-meaning parent or community member. The reality is that anyone, anywhere, with any motive can access them.
Some schools have made efforts to be more cautious by using only first names, avoiding location tags, restricting posts to term-time. But most have not.
Google Classroom
Google classroom became ubiquitous in schools across England during the COVID-19 pandemic and remained deeply embedded in school practice since. While originally designed for secondary students, it's now widely used in primary schools.
Teachers regularly post photos to Google classroom: images of classroom activities, group work, achievements, displays. Some schools use it as a communication tool with parents, posting updates about the school day. Others restrict it to student work only. The policies vary wildly between schools, and even between teachers within the same school.
What remains consistent is that every upload exists on Google's infrastructure. The company's privacy policy for educational accounts promises certain protections like no advertising to children, no use of student data for commercial purposes - but the data still resides on servers subject to US law, company policies that can change, and security measures that parents cannot verify.
Parents rarely consider these implications. They see Google classroom as simply "how schools work now", it's the digital equivalent of an exercise book. But an exercise book doesn't create a searchable, permanent record stored by a commercial entity. An exercise book doesn't make a child's writing about their family circumstances visible to all their classmates. An exercise book can't be subject to a data breach affecting millions of users.
Class Blogs and Public Websites
Some teachers, with the best intentions, maintain public blogs documenting their class's activities. This could be a history project, a science experiment, a creative handwriting assignment. They include photos of children, examples of their work, sometimes even video clips.
These blogs are searchable. They're indexed by Google. They exist permanently unless actively taken down. They contain a detailed narrative of children's specific school experiences, often over multiple years. And in the wrong hands could be detriment to that child's future.
When Permission Isn't Really Permission
All of this happens, ostensibly, with parent consent. Schools are required under data protection law to obtain consent before using children's images. So where's the problem?
When parents enrol their child, particularly in Reception, they receive a pack of documents: medical forms, emergency contacts, uniform polices, behaviour policies, school trips, collection arrangements, and somewhere in the middle, a media consent form. It's often a single checkbox in a long list: "I consent my child's photograph being used for school purposes." Sometimes it specifies "including social media". Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it's not there at all.
Parents sign. They have to sign everything to complete the enrolment. Many (most) don't read every word carefully. They certainly don't contemplate the full implications that "school purposes" might mean their three-year-old's face on Facebook for the next seven years, or that "promotional materials" could include the school's public marketing campaign. Over the period of the child school life - the platforms change, the volume of posting increases, the data handling practices of commercial companies shift. The original consent (if at all) becomes increasingly disconnected from what's actually happening.
Pressure to Consent
Schools will say consent is optional. In theory, it is, in practice, parents who withhold consent find that their children are excluded from documentation in ways that are isolating and stigmatising.
When the class photo happens, their child is removed. When achievement is celebrated online, their child's name isn't mentioned. When the school trip photos are shared, their child is cropped out - or worse, the photo isn't taken. Or worse again, an emoji icon is dropped on the child's face, and the emoji selection would be dependent on the season or the social media managers mood. An option that has become apparent recently, for convenience, something that is completely disrespectful to the child and their parents. Teachers sometimes express frustration with parents who don't consent, seeing them as difficult or overprotective.
Children notice. They notice that everyone else is in the class photo but them. They notice that their friend's parents saw photos of the trip but their own parents didn't. They notice that their achievements don't get celebrated online while others' do. No parent wants their child to feel excluded, and schools know this. The social pressure to consent is enormous.
Some parents withdraw consent after problems arise i.e. an estranged partner finds photos, or they discover their child's image being used in ways they didn't anticipate. Schools often respond poorly, treating it as an inconvenience rather than a legitimate concern.
Not truly informed
Even when parents do read the consent forms carefully and sign willingly, are they truly informed?
They don't know that content uploaded to Google Classroom is stored on Google's servers, which may be located in multiple countries, subject to various jurisdictions' surveillance laws, and governed by complex data processing agreements they've never seen.
They don't know that public social media posts can be scraped by third-parties, by data brokers, by advertising companies, by anyone with basic technical skills. And used for purposes that have nothing to do with education.
They don't know that images may be used to train facial recognition systems or other AI models. They don't know that "deleted" posts often remain in back up systems or cached versions available through Internet archive.
They don't know that when they consent to school photographs, those images might be sold to commercial photography companies who then market them back to parents, keeping the images in their commercial database for years.
They don't know the full scope of who has access to Google Classroom within the school. Is it just the class teacher, or also teaching assistants, supply teachers, administrative staff, IT support?
They don't know how long the images will be retained, what happens when their child leaves the school, or how to actually enforce deletion if they change their mind.
Informed consent requires understanding the full implications of what you're agreeing to. In most cases, that understanding isn't their.
The Permanence Problem
Children born in 2015 are growing up as the first generation to have comprehensive digital records for their childhood created without their consent. They can't opt out. They don't have capacity to consent. Yet decisions made by adults when they were three or four will follow them for life.
The Right to Erasure (GDPR Article 17) exists in principle. In practice, it's nearly impossible to enforce comprehensively. An image on Facebook may be shared, screenshot, re-posted to other platforms. An image on a class blog may be cached by Google, archived by Internet Archive, or saved by anyone who visited the page. Requesting deletion from the original source doesn't eliminate the copies.
Childhood photos have longevity and should be private. The embarrassing moment caught in reception, caught on camera, shared on Tapestry, perhaps forwarded by a thoughtless parent, can surface a decade later. The child who struggled with behaviour at seven, documented in reflection time or learning support contexts, may find those records when they're seventeen and applying to university. Future employers search online. The digital footprint of well meaning teachers becomes part of a young person's permanent record. They suddenly become guilty until proven innocent.