Every school is about to need a position on AI and images.
A brief for school communications.
What changed
For a long time now, the prevailing advice of school communication was more : more channels, more posts, more photography, more content: build the brand, tell the story.
Not in 2026. Access to generative AI has rewritten the rules. Any public photo of a child can now be altered, convincingly, in seconds, by anyone.
High-profile cases of abuse using Australian school images have been in the media since 2024.
It’s time to be more intentional about how we share images and stories online.
Three lenses for improving privacy and eSafety in how schools use images.
Infrastructure
Where images are stored, filed, and retrieved — and who can reach them.
Image mis-use
A risk to be mitigated, not removed entirely — deterrence and accountability, not a vault.
Policy
Clear positions on consent, image-taking, and how images are stored.
Risk is a dial, not a switch.
Most schools have the dial turned all the way up, by default.
Owned, access-controlled
Locked to your community. Not searchable, not given to crawlers.
Owned, access-controlled
Locked to your community. Not searchable, not given to crawlers.
Where today’s options sit
Every channel trades reach against exposure.
The ways schools share today run from owned-and-locked to pushed-to-the-public — each buys reach at the cost of control.
Owned + access-controlled
Intranet, LMS, SIS
Good for — Keeping things to people with an account.
The cost — Everyone needs a login; grandparents, alumni and prospective families are shut out — high friction, so often nobody reads it.
Closed group
Private Facebook group, school app
Good for — A known, approved community.
The cost — Constant moderation; all-or-nothing (you can’t show a prospective family a taste); usually a platform you don’t own — your stories and data in someone else’s silo.
Public website
School news page
Good for — Discoverability and sharing — prospective families.
The cost — Indexable, crawlable, downloadable; visible to anyone, anonymously; effectively permanent and hard to retract.
Social media
Facebook, Instagram
Good for — Reach and new audiences.
The cost — Fully open and pushed to strangers by an algorithm; no control once posted; you own neither the platform, the audience, nor the data.
Lowering the risk of misuse, without going silent
In most documented Australian cases, the person responsible was a student of the same school. An insider, known to the victims, often unaware they were breaking the law.
We see deterrence as a primary lever for schools to pull, to balance the power of telling the important stories without introducing unacceptable risk.
Our model is a front-door camera: it changes behaviour when people know they’ve been seen and logged, and makes the one who tries anyway identifiable.
Giving control back to schools.
You’re in control; not Mark Zuckerberg. Two settings, chosen per story: who can find it, and who can read it.
Try it
Who can find it
Who can read it
Anyone can find it. To read it, people enter an email address, which is recorded in your access log.
What a stranger sees
People who leave an emailKitchen garden
First harvest from the kitchen garden
Tomatoes, beans and an honest oversupply of zucchini.
Leave your email in our visitors’ book to read this story.
Magic Link
Your school’s Magic Link is the way in for your community. Share it in your newsletter, portal or group chat. A story set to Only with Magic Link shows only to people who came in through it. The link changes every 90 days by default, and you can reset it whenever you like.
The visitors’ book
To read a story that asks for an email, a reader signs the visitors’ book: an email address and a one-time code, once per device for 120 days. Every entry goes in your access log. The reader’s email is stamped faintly on every photo they see.
No parent login
OurNews does not use accounts or logins. Signing the visitors’ book is a record and a deterrent, not proof of identity. Grandparents, alumni and prospective parents can read and connect with your stories too.
Mitigating risk, not eliminating it.
Nothing on a screen can be made un-copyable. If a photo can be seen, it can be captured. What you can control is the audience, the searchability, and whether your images sit on a platform engineered to be scraped.
This is deterrence and accountability, not a vault. The schools that handle it well will have made deliberate choices and be able to show their reasoning.
Our goal is to empower schools to do exactly that.
Introducing OurNews
Share your school’s stories while managing privacy and eSafety risk with OurNews
OurNews is a school storytelling platform your school owns: where you publish your stories to the people who care about them, in a space you control.
Teachers contribute in a couple of taps. The platform handles the layout and design. Families get a newsletter that works on a phone.
We don’t plug into your student information system, on purpose: no student database to leak, and Grandma still gets to stay up to date with her grandkids.