Child protection is high on the agenda of most schools, particularly pre-school and primary and any system which involves the use of photographs or video must provide adequate safeguards to ensure that these images are not misused.
The key fact to understand with regard to the Earwig platform is that it is a CLOSED SYSTEM. This means that no-one can access any of the site content unless they are Earwig Account Holders and have a login and password provided by a school.
Nothing is accessible by the general public. From the moment a photo or a video is taken it remains within the system. The only people who can access these images are…
Even then, individual parents can only access images in which their own children have been tagged by school staff.
When teaching staff take photos or video using the Earwig app, these are deleted from the device as soon as they are uploaded to Earwig. So there is no chance of images leaving the school inadvertently on phones or tablets.
Parents are entitled to opt out of the Earwig parent share process at any time, in which case access to their children’s images will be restricted to school Staff. Parents are also advised that any images that they buy from the website should not be displayed on the internet without due consideration of child security issues.
Pupils at Earwig schools may be flagged as ‘No Photos’ for several reasons including parental opt-out or being designated as ‘Looked After’. Any Earwig Records in which any No Photos Pupil is tagged is automatically designated an ‘Internal’ Record and therefore not visible to anyone outside the school.