School social media feeds are full of good news: sports days, trips, assemblies, prize-giving. For years, the main questions about those photos were consent and whether a pupil could be identified. AI has added another.
Teacher Tapp's weekly results, published on 13 October, start with a grim reference point. There has been press coverage of criminals manipulating images of pupils from school social media posts into sexually explicit images, then demanding money from the school in exchange for not releasing them.
Against that background, Teacher Tapp asked senior leaders in September how their schools use pupil images.
What schools are doing now
56% of primary and 69% of secondary leaders said their schools share images with pupils' faces fully visible. A smaller group share side profiles or partial faces (9% of primary, 7% of secondary), or share photos but never faces (13% of primary, 8% of secondary). Only 7% of primary and 6% of secondary leaders said their school does not share photos at all.
But practice is shifting. In September, 43% of primary and 32% of secondary leaders said their rules had become more restrictive since last year. Teacher Tapp predicts more schools will stop sharing photos online.
Why AI changes the calculation
A clear, front-facing photo of a child, posted publicly and linked to a named school, is exactly the kind of image that image-generation tools can manipulate. The harm does not depend on the original photo being inappropriate in any way. It depends only on the photo being available.
That does not mean schools must stop celebrating pupils. It means the default settings for a public post deserve the same scrutiny as any other safeguarding decision.
Questions for your next policy review
Does the image need a face? Many celebrations work as well with hands on a science experiment, a team from behind, or pupils' work rather than pupils.
Does it need to be public? A parent portal or private channel can share the moment with families without making it available to anyone.
Is consent still informed? Parents who agreed to photo use several years ago may not have been thinking about AI manipulation. Updating the consent form to explain the risk in plain language gives them a real choice.
Do you know what is already out there? Older posts on public accounts remain available unless someone removes them. Decide whether any should come down.
Do staff and pupils know what to do? If a manipulated image appears, the response should be the same as for any other image-based abuse: do not share it, report it to the designated safeguarding lead, and use routes such as Report Remove for young people.
A lesson as well as a policy
The same issue belongs in the curriculum. Pupils share images of themselves and each other too. Teaching how image-generation tools can alter a photo, why a real image can be turned into a fake one, and what to do if it happens, is AI literacy that protects pupils directly.
Teacher Tapp's same results show that 80% of teachers now use AI for schoolwork at least monthly, and growth is slowing. Most staff now know what the tools can do. The next step is making sure that knowledge shapes how the school protects the pupils in its photos.
Source: Teacher Tapp, Student images on social media, cyber attacks, plus leadership ambitions, 13 October 2026. Results come from Teacher Tapp's app panel of teachers and leaders in England; the article does not give sample sizes. The extortion cases are described from press coverage, not Teacher Tapp data.