Photos of students on network..

[dthebike]

After a photo of a student was copied from the network and defaced, I have been told to remove all pictures of students from the network folders that students can access . This is on the basis that it is a child protection issue and that we are breaking the law by having photos of students available for students to see. These are photos of trips, special events, sports days, music/dance/drama performances etc.

 

Apart from the work involved in trawling through the 30,000 images in 9,000 folders, this just seems daft and plain wrong. The misdemeanor is in the defacement, and babies should not be chucked out with bathwater. Anyone else has policies regarding posting student photos or comments on this?

[hullsmostwanted]

We had a similar situation and had hundreds of photographs of students on our intranet. After a minor incident we reviewed our situation alongside the county data / child protection policies and found that we were being negligent.

 

We now recommend to all staff that they can put photos from trips, sports day etc on the intranet for a few days and then must remove them. We check about every half-term or so and delete any left on there because some people don't grasp the concept.

[SpuffMonkey]

Just bizarre! Delete pictures of people you see for real everyday??

[dthebike]

Interested to know on what grounds the school was being negligent...

 

Also, it would seem to me that either you are or you aren't allowed to post photos and to post images for up to half a term isn't effective if there is a CP issue here.

[mavhc]

Move them to the staff only share, then let the teachers copy specific ones back to pupil share when needed

[Dos_Box]

They are, of course, going to ensure that the pupils all delete similar pics from their phones are they not?

[MYK-IT]

Shame, as I could have loaned it to you!

[mavhc]

Suggest you buy these for everyone, just in case

[alan-d]

Look on the bright side - Look at all that disk space you are going to save

[elsiegee40]

We put photos of pupils on a staff only share. Staff are not permitted to have photos in their own areas under our AUP.... this is partly to protect them from in case of allegation and mostly to give me the right to delete all jpegs from home drives to free up space!

[alan-d]

All photos of students and events are published to a photo album that we host on a server using JAlbum. Only authorised users can view them and saving is disabled. Can't do anything about Print Screen but the image would be small or of a poor quality and in addition we can track where it was printed and who printed it

[dthebike]

This sounds like it may hit the spot - time to play with JAlbum methinks. Thanks for the tip

[fiendishlyclever]

We treat student photos as personal data and must be stored on a secure area of the network - not in user folders etc.

 

Of course paper copies of photographs are all over the school and these are treated in a totally different way. Aren't paper copies subject to the same regulations?

 

As a special school we take a lot of photographs - I know other special schools in our LA haven't got as far as even thinking about this yet. It is interesting to hear how other schools treat photographs of students.

[SYNACK]

Suggest you buy these for everyone, just in case

 

That was the first thing that I thought of to, seems to be an overkill personally. We have genuine CP considerations regarding some of our students and these kinds of policies do exist for any external publication like the internet or newsletter but if the person is already inside our network then they are almost certainly inside the school and could go and see the person directly or take a photo themselves.

 

On a similar note I have a related topic, face recognition. As our policies are based more on individuals rather than everyone it would be quite useful to run face recognition on all photos on the network to make sure that none are potentially problematic. Does anyone know of anything like this that could either look through all the photos and find specific people or just catogorize every person in an image so that such photos could be removed to a secure area as in the other scenarios meantioned above. It would have to be a lot quicker than manually scanning through each one.

[jimmy_2k]

We keep all photos in a staff only file share though the students keep pics of themselves on their own home drives. There has been talk of putting these images on a secure flickr account, however i'd rather have this data in a protected location that we have control over.

[p858snake]

All photos of students and events are published to a photo album that we host on a server using JAlbum. Only authorised users can view them and saving is disabled. Can't do anything about Print Screen but the image would be small or of a poor quality and in addition we can track where it was printed and who printed it

If it does it how I think it will, there is even easier ways than that depending on what browser(/s) you use.

[AngryTechnician]

...that we are breaking the law by having photos of students available for students to see.

This part in particular is definitely BS. I'd be tempted to ask them to either provide the text of this imaginary law or find someone else to do it, and next time they want you do do something over the top they give you a reason that isn't made up.

 

The more practical advice above stands. We also keep all our photos on staff-only drives, but not because there is any law saying we have to control access to them.

[elsiegee40]

There is no law saying we cant allow people to see photos of students. Every school prospectus would be breaking it. We DO have to protect the identity of our students, so no names with pictures.

 

To ensure that identities are protected and to protect staff from allegation, we choose to keep electronic images in a staff only shared area and never on personal drives on the network.

[laserblazer]

All of our parent/carers sign to say that they permit their child's photo to be stored internally, put in the newspaper or online. We have a list of the half dozen who have declined.

[Andrew_C]

More madness. I think I want to leave the Earth and live on Mars.

[m25man]

Half the trouble is people making up "laws" as they go along...

At the end of the day it is all down to one smart lawyers interpretation of a rule of law.

 

The CPA doesn't seem to have any teeth, they consider each case individually if it contravenes the DPA problem solved there is a path to follow.

Where it is clearly a case of child protection matters - far too many examples to state here, it seems to be do what ever needs to be done to avoid litigation and that's about it!

Seems crazy that the CPA can advise a school not to allow a video shoot but couldn't prevent issues like Baby P and other atrocities!

 

This was taken from the ICO website http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protection/detailed_specialist_guides/taking_photographs_in_schools.pdf

As these guys now seem to have the power to prosecute and fine anyone with data to store I would direct all policy questions to the ICO and seek a definitive guide rather than pure speculation as this thread and many like it seem to thrive upon.

This country has gone PC/CP mad and it's not safe to take a photo of anything that breathes!

 

Most Head teachers I have spoken to don't have a clue what they can and can't do/say or host...

 

We recently had to shoot two case studies for a leading hardware vendor, in school A no children were allowed in camera shot and everything was edited heavily to edit and obscure any child images.

School B however had queues of young kids desperate to star in the video shoot, a quick Disclaimer form was sent home with all participants and the visor was shot without a hitch.

 

Why such a disparity in policy between Heads?

 

As Data Protection and Child Protection cross paths it's no wonder Network Managers are confused as to what is permissible or not.

 

As I see it the ICO is the only source of guidance because the CPA simply doesn't seem to have this under any definitive control.

 

But just to throw petrol on the fire, what about the teacher that decided to store his holiday DVDs on the school network, these included topless videos of his lady wife and naked photos of his children playing in a paddling pool somewhere in Greece!

 

This came to light when all of a sudden storage issues and backup became a problem at his school.

Should I have gone the the head and destroy his career?

No - we deleted all of the material and had words off the record.

The law is an ASS!