Publishing on the school website

Schools are contributing to this rich vein of online information by publishing information on the web about their activities. These websites are available to Internet users across the world.

The value

A school website encourages communication with a wider audience including schools in other countries, parents, past pupils, business and the community, and provides up to date information about the school's activities.

The development of such a site by pupils and staff is truly cross-curricular.

The potential risks

Personal Safety

* Feeling uncomfortable

If a website includes a pupil's picture, then this could be downloaded from the web, and edited in an unpleasant or embarrassing way. This new image could be circulated via newsgroups or on another webpage.

Parents have concerns that information about their children may be made available worldwide by schools, and that their children can be identified and traced.

Schools could find themselves the centre of unwarranted media attention if the content of a school's website is not carefully overseen. For example, search engines deal with words individually rather than in context, and deliver sites to the browser based upon those individual words. A website that included the phrase "Ourtown school is a single sex education establishment", could be proffered to a web user who was looking for occurrences of "sex".

* Child protection

A pupil could be traced if their name and picture appear on the school's website. It would be possible for them to be contacted by someone wishing them harm.

The recommendations

* Education Authorities should be approached for guidelines concerning parental permission for publishing pupils' pictures on the web.

* Schools may wish to consider whether pupils are put at risk when pictures of them appear on the school website.

* References to specific pupils should only be made if they do not conflict with the school's Personal Safety Programmed and Child Protection Guidelines.

* School website developers should take special care that pupils' safety and justifies are not compromised.

* The methods that search engines use to index the contents of websites should be borne in mind when producing text for a school website.