Who Gave You Permission to Post Me?

We spend a lot of time in education talking to children about internet safety. We tell them to be careful what they share, not to post personal information, to think about who might be looking at their photographs and to remember that once something is online, it can be very difficult to take it back. Yet adults seem to be doing exactly the opposite on their behalf.

I find it increasingly uncomfortable scrolling through social media and seeing schools, educational programmes, worldschooling organisations and family influencers using very clear images of children to promote themselves. Not children somewhere in the background of what is happening, but their faces front and centre, sometimes accompanied by their names, where they are, what they are doing and details about their lives.

As an educator, I find it difficult to understand. Safeguarding isn’t just about risk assessments, background checks and making sure children are physically safe when they are with us. It is also about their privacy, their choices and protecting a digital identity that they may be far too young to understand themselves. There is an important difference between parental permission and a child’s consent. A parent might be perfectly happy for an organisation to post photographs of their three-year-old, but that child cannot possibly understand what it means for their face to be published to thousands of strangers, used to market a programme or left online for years to come.

And I think this is something families should be asking about when choosing a school or programme. How are photographs of my child going to be used? Where will they be published? Who will see them? How long will they remain there? And, importantly, does my child actually want this? The same questions apply to what we share ourselves as parents. There are family and travel accounts built around children’s lives, with ordinary family moments, locations and photographs of children swimming or playing on beaches shared publicly. We would probably be horrified if our children started sharing that much information about themselves with strangers online, yet somehow it has become normal for adults to do it for them.

In our own family, if somebody asks to take a photograph of our children, we ask the children. They know they can say no, and quite often they do. We don’t then tell them to stand there and smile because an adult wants a photograph. For me, that goes beyond social media. Children need to learn that they have agency over themselves. They don’t have to agree to something simply because an adult has asked them to do it. If we want children to understand boundaries, consent and personal safety, we have to give them opportunities to practise saying no, and then show them that adults will respect the answer.

We aren’t perfect at Harmony either. We take photographs and videos because we need to show families what we’re doing, and occasionally children’s faces will appear. But we consciously try not to make children themselves our marketing material. We photograph from behind, obscure faces where appropriate and focus much more on what is happening; the hands working, the places we’re exploring, the things being made, investigated and discovered. There is plenty to show without making a child’s face the product.

Perhaps before a photograph goes online, whether we’re a school, a programme or simply a parent, there are a few basic questions worth asking. Why am I posting this? Who gets to see it? Does it need to be public? And if this child were genuinely able to choose for themselves, would they want me to? Those seem like pretty reasonable questions to ask before we press post.