Stronger government support is needed on the misuse of pupil images, leaders have said, after a survey found more than two in five heads have had to manage the issue. A survey by the safeguarding platform Aidos found 49 per cent of 500 UK headteachers said they had dealt with a pupil image being misused, manipulated or used in a blackmail attempt. It comes after the Internet Watch Foundation reported that images of pupils in one secondary school were scraped off its website and turned into AI-generated child sexual abuse material. The images were sent to the school with a ransom threat. The UK online harms working group recommended all schools remove any identifiable images of their pupils from their websites, while legal experts have said they have seen a “significant spike” in schools concerned about their policies. The survey also found headteachers lacked confidence in handling these incidents, while many had not updated their school photos in the past three years. Leadership unions have called for greater government action to help schools strengthen their cybersecurity. Forty-nine per cent of heads said their school had experienced an incident where pupil images were misused, manipulated or used as part of an extortion or blackmail attempt. Updated images Fifty-four per cent said they were concerned about their school’s published images, with only 34 per cent saying they updated their pictures on websites and social media annually. Most (52 per cent) updated them every two to three years. Only 43 per cent of heads said their image consent process addressed the risks of AI deepfake generation. Charlie O’Sullivan, the director of safeguarding at The Collegiate Trust, said the findings were “harrowing”. His trust had to rethink its strategy after the Internet Watch Foundation. Reports and had removed the ability to save images directly from a website. It was alsoworking to disable screenshots. “This is a huge risk, we’ve got pictures of our children absolutely everywhere,” he said. “We’ve got to be thinking proactively, not reactively”. Consent forms needed to be updated as they were written when leaders “weren’t thinking about these risks”. But the government’s silence on the issue created a “fear” of speaking about it with parents. “It’s not spoken about nationally and there isn’t guidance that’s easily accessible to schools that says you need to tell parents this,” he said. ‘Recognised the risk’ Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the school leaders’ union NAHT said while government had “recognised the risks and there has been progress”, school staff would like more guidance and help. Pepe Di’Iasio, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, agreed that heads would welcome more support in strengthening their security. “This is an area in which new vulnerabilities can quickly emerge.” From the start of the academic year, new guidance on keeping children safe in education says schools must treat incidents involving AI-generated sexual images of children as a safeguarding matter. It brought such sexual “deepfakes” in line with the rules for real photographs.