Guides › Safety
The photo of someone else's child
A school's website needs photographs, and the ones that work are of children doing the thing. It is also the case that one family in every intake would rather their child was not on the internet, and they usually do not tell you until they see the picture.
This is general information rather than legal advice; what a school is required to obtain, and from whom, varies and is a question for your attorney. What follows is about how to avoid the situation rather than how to argue about it.
Ask at enrollment, not at the shoot
The single change that removes most of the difficulty is putting the question on the enrollment form, once, in plain words: may we use photographs and video of your child on our website and social media?
Asked then, it is a normal administrative question and about nine families in ten say yes. Asked after a photo is already up, it is a complaint, and the answer is different because the question is different.
Record the answer where the instructor will see it
A permission that lives in a filing cabinet is not a permission anyone can act on. The person who needs it is holding a phone at the end of a class, deciding whether to post the group shot.
Whatever system you use, the answer has to be visible next to the child's name on the class list. If it is not, it will be checked once, in the first week, and never again.
A no is not a problem to be solved
It is worth saying because the instinct is to talk the family round. There are families with genuinely serious reasons — custody arrangements, protective orders, immigration situations — who will not explain them to you and should not have to.
The workable answer is compositional: the photographs that carry a school's website are mostly not identifiable faces anyway. A row of feet on a mat, a group from behind, hands adjusting a belt, an empty studio in the morning light. These are better photographs and they solve the problem at the same time.
What we do on our own demos
Since we build demonstration sites from what schools have already published, this rule applies to us too, and we hold to it: no recognisable child's face goes on a site we build for a school that has not asked us to put it there. Rooms, equipment, adults, distance and backs — those are fine.
It is the one rule in our whole product that is not about business.
What this means for your website
The photo permission is a question on your enrollment form, and the answer sits with the child on the class list where an instructor will actually see it.
When we build a demo of your school before you have hired us, we use pictures of your space and your adults. No child's face goes on a site we built until you tell us it may.