When Loughborough Schools Foundation (LSF) made the choice to remove identifiable imagery of children from their marketing, they became the first organisation of their kind to do so. Working with them on five websites for five schools, we balanced digital safeguarding, creative problem solving, and editing flexibility to rethink how schools can market themselves.
Service:
The Challenge
The capabilities of artificial intelligence and AI-powered image generation have increased tenfold over recent months and years, bringing about an increased risk of photo misuse. Such misuse poses a problem for everyone, from celebrities to everyday people, but it’s a particularly serious risk where children are concerned.
Schools now face heightened responsibility to protect their students through digital safeguarding. But when so much traditional school marketing incorporates images of pupils, it’s now especially challenging for schools to balance the duty to their children and the need to deliver effective marketing campaigns.
Loughborough Schools Foundation opted for a first-of-its-kind solution to this issue: remove all identifiable images of children from every aspect of their marketing. They tasked us with creating five visually appealing websites, unique to each of the five schools within the foundation. Each website needed to align with the foundation’s brand guidelines, and show the personality, community, and culture of the schools, but without using any photos of children’s faces.
The websites needed to give LSF maximum flexibility to update content and make changes to suit each school’s campaigns, which refreshed every 6-12 months.
The Solution
Working with our front-end developer, Jake, our discovery process helped us determine how to communicate the schools’ identities without showing children’s faces. We identified several opportunities to make this happen.
Shapes and patterns from the brand guidelines reinforced the personality of the foundation across each website, and the use of interactive, animated elements added engagement and movement. Emphasis on typography and colour gave each website extra character and vibrancy.
Avoiding the use of children’s faces didn’t mean abandoning the use of photography. With photos of the school buildings and grounds, as well as student activity - without faces, of course - we were able to demonstrate the culture and personality of the school. Cropped angles and over-the-shoulder photos of the students kept the pupils as an important part of the websites, but without using identifiable features.
Jake took a mobile-first approach to the sites, optimising images, performance, and accessibility. Each site was built in WordPress, designed to provide the flexibility that LSF needed to update their content themselves. Custom blocks allowed full editing control, with a shared block library across five sites offering independent styling within a uniform structure.
The Outcome
The Loughborough Schools Foundation is now the proud owner of five visually cohesive yet distinct websites that perfectly communicate each school’s personality without showing a single student face. These websites all feel human and inviting, whilst demonstrating LSF’s commitment to student safeguarding to parents of potential and current students alike.
They designed websites that are not video-led, instead incorporating playful, movable assets such as animated footers to bring warmth and personality without compromising safety or values. They also future-proofed the sites through flexible content blocks, enabling us to continuously adapt and evolve as we develop a new media library aligned with our latest practice.
The websites’ custom and shared blocks give LSF increased freedom to edit content as and when they need to, without relying on or waiting for assistance from us or other suppliers. The result of all this work is five future-proof websites that strike the perfect balance between marketing efficacy and child protection requirements.
See the websites in action at www.lsf.org.
RKH understood the brief from day one and absolutely nailed it. In under five months, they delivered five beautiful, streamlined websites, designed with both desktop and mobile users firmly in mind.
Communication throughout the project was excellent. We spoke daily, feedback was acted on quickly, and issues were resolved efficiently. The team consistently demonstrated a positive, solutions-focused attitude and a genuine commitment to delivering high-quality work. We are absolutely thrilled with the results.