As you may be aware, the UK Safer Internet Centre has published new national guidance related to the use of pupil pictures and videos used on school websites. This important guidance has been circulated via Bolton’s Safeguarding team but you can find the full document here –School Image guidance
Although these new guidelines are not statutory, we understand that, as a school, you will be keen to adhere to any national guidance pertaining to the safeguarding of children in your care.
This school image guidance reflects emerging safeguarding risks linked to AI image manipulation, where publicly available images (including those on school websites) can be downloaded and misused.
Schools are now encouraged to take a more cautious approach to publishing pupil images and videos online, including:
- Reviewing whether pupil images are necessary at all
- Avoiding images where pupils are clearly identifiable (e.g. close‑up faces)
- Avoiding the use of pupil names alongside images
- Using group shots, distance shots, or alternative angles where possible
- Regularly auditing and removing outdated images of children who no longer attend the school
- Ensuring consent is up to date
- Minimising public exposure (e.g. limiting high‑risk content on fully public pages)
These recommendations apply to both photos and videos published on school websites and social media.
Important note on videos
We know how much schools and their wider communities value bespoke website videos, and recognise how effectively they capture the essence of your schools. However, videos are specifically identified as higher risk because they:
- Contain multiple frames of identifiable imagery
- Can be more easily extracted and reused
- Often include additional contextual information (location, uniform, voice)
Schools are encouraged to review existing videos and consider:
- Whether they are still required
- Whether visibility should be reduced or restricted
- Whether content should be replaced with safer alternatives
Recommended next steps
As your website provider, we recommend that your school:
- Carries out a review of images and videos currently on your website
- Confirms consent is still valid
- Identifies any content that may pose increased safeguarding risk such as single child images, images of children who have left the school or any face-on shots
- Updates your internal policies to reflect the latest guidance (a possible template for this policy is attached for you to adapt, validate and use)
What we can if SICT are your website provider
We’d like to offer a range of potential solutions and would welcome your feedback to help us identify the best approach for your needs. Please note that these options would incur additional costs.
- School can adopt a completely “No pupil images” approach whereby we replace all your website images with the children completely removed to showcase your school grounds and areas (you can also opt for an entirely new photo shoot)
- School can decide to purchase a new photo package from us every year where will ensure the images used on your website are fully compliant with the new guidance. In this way, you can still include pictures of your pupils.
- School can pinpoint images that it identifies as no longer being appropriate for use on their website and we can replace the children in the image with AI generated substitutions. Here is an example –
Original image-
AI generated child-
As always, safeguarding remains the priority. This guidance is about helping schools continue to showcase their work while reducing risk to pupils. We know that this is a significant shift in expectations, but it doesn’t mean no images/videos, the UK Safer Internet Centre are working towards a “use carefully, reduce identifiability, review regularly, and justify why they are needed” approach.
Bolton Schools ICT
