The childcare and early education sector is in the spotlight once again for all the wrong reasons. Calls to remove male carers from the industry and enforcement of blanket bans on personal devices are underway – and the ripple effect is now being felt across the broader education sector, including schools.
Schools are not exempt. According to a recent statement from NASASV addressing delays in child protection efforts in Australia, an average of six alleged incidents of child-on-child abuse are reported to police each week during the school term in Victorian public schools – a confronting statistic that underscores the urgency of the issue.
While these allegations are deeply disturbing, they are also triggering a much needed reckoning around safeguarding protocols, especially in how schools manage and protect student images and personal data. When media sits on personal phones, or is scattered across USBs, inboxes, and cloud drives, it becomes nearly impossible to control, audit, or delete. Generic media systems simply don’t offer the level of protection children need or deserve. Schools need specialised systems purpose-built around data protection to ensure they are fulfilling their duty of care to students.
At pixevety, we’ve seen a surge in requests from schools asking for urgent help: “How do we get photos off personal devices?” It’s a question that speaks volumes. It shows just how common informal, risky photo-sharing practices have become and how unprepared many schools are when faced with a crisis that demands airtight media safety protocols. Fortunately, we are able to assist schools in providing their staff with compliance-driven app technology that takes photos off devices directly storing them in a central and secure school-owned media gallery to reduce such risk. Such technology combined with a change in the cultural dependency of personal phone use in schools is a good path forward in supporting schools in this space.
When a Photo-Sharing Culture Becomes a Safeguarding Risk
We are living in the age of the “School-o-gram moment” – a term we use to describe the growing trend of schools treating student moments as public marketing and social media content. What starts off as well-intentioned internal celebration quickly slips into public publishing and exposure. Without strong leadership and oversight, even well-meaning teachers can contribute to an unsafe media sharing culture where children’s images are scattered across personal phones, cloud drives, or public school-feeds without lawful consent.
At the same time, many schools are relying on tools that are simply not “fit for purpose” – lacking the critical privacy and protection safeguards needed to manage children’s data, especially sensitive data, responsibly. While these tools may claim to offer the right features, have they been independently reviewed or rigorously tested. Do they hold any formal certification to back those claims? Can they clearly explain how they safeguard children’s data to the highest standards?
In today’s environment, where a single image leak can trigger legal action, reputational damage, or serious harm to a child, many schools are still balancing precariously between convenience, cost and compliance. It’s a dangerous position. If your media practices aren’t secure, auditable, and backed by policy, you’re walking a tightrope. Now is the time to step off the rope and ask: Is our current approach defensible? Is it safe? Is it putting children at risk?
Safeguarding Isn’t Optional. It’s the Law.
This isn’t just about compliance. It’s about trust, risk mitigation, and the duty of care we owe every child. When media isn’t centrally/systemically controlled or securely stored, it opens the door to misuse – intended or otherwise.
And in an environment where public trust is shaken, the tolerance for grey areas in media management is gone. Schools that don’t act decisively now may find themselves exposed not just reputationally, but legally. Child safeguarding isn’t just a moral imperative for schools – it’s a legal obligation.
Under privacy, child protection, and education regulations, schools are required to take reasonable steps to prevent harm, and that includes harm stemming from the misuse of student data and images. Media shared without appropriate permissions, stored on unsecured devices, retained for longer than necessary, used without a clear lawful purpose, or published without lawful basis can expose schools to legal liability, regulatory investigations, and community backlash.
This includes compliance with legislation such as:
- Privacy Acts (national and state-based)
- Child Safe Standards
- Education department policies and guidelines
- And in many regions, statutory duty of care obligations
Yet, even today, we still see schools making decision around media technology driven by other forces – marketing needs, convenience, cost-savings – rather than actual safety outcomes. Remember the old saying: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” That’s also true when a school selects a tech provider based primarily on price.
The Real Cost of Choosing the Wrong Tool
Thankfully, most educators I meet are deeply committed to student safety (and that’s why they reach out to pixevety). But there are still many schools making decisions purely based on simplicity or price, rather than ensuring:
Is this platform built to support child safety and lawful data use.
Let’s face it, many tools being marketed to schools today were never designed with education-sector obligations in mind. Many “pivoted” during Covid in the hope they could grab share of a more stable consumer market but don’t even comply with basic data protection, sovereignty or consent requirements. And when something goes wrong, there’s often no audit trail, no accountability, and no way back. When schools choose media platforms that prioritise child visibility over responsibility, they’re not just buying new software they’re taking on new risk.
The Unfortunate New Reality.
It shouldn’t take a crisis to push schools toward better media safety practices. But if that’s what it takes, the response now must be swift, serious, and systemic.
Don’t wait for the next headline to force your hand into doing something. The right technology already exists to protect your students, your staff, and your school community. And when it comes to children’s safety, “good enough” media handling is no longer good enough.
