In most schools, parents and children are unwitting participants in a silent contract. We sign a form once at the start of the year, tick boxes about photographs or class trips, and from then on we are swept into a system where the assumption is that silence equals agreement. A teacher sends home a note about sharing pictures on the school website; if you don’t respond, the assumption is that you are perfectly fine with your child’s face smiling across the internet. A nurse visits for vaccinations, the letter is lost in a backpack between gala wrappers and half-eaten biscuits, and somehow your child is first in line.
On one hand, you can sympathize with the administrators. Schools are not law firms; they are barely able to keep track of lost uniforms. Getting hundreds of parents to sign forms for every picture, every event, every new digital app feels like a logistical nightmare. If they waited for explicit permission each time, children might graduate before the paperwork came back. Implied consent, therefore, feels practical — like the shortcut you take when you can’t face the Third Mainland Bridge traffic. It is fast, efficient, and keeps everyone moving.
But practicality doesn’t excuse the quiet erosion of rights. Imagine if we ran households this way. Suppose your teenager “implied consented” to a late-night party because you didn’t expressly forbid it within 24 hours. Or if your spouse implied consented to buying a new plasma TV because you didn’t reply to their WhatsApp message. Absurd? Exactly. Yet in the school environment, we let implied consent become the governing principle because it suits the institution.
The consequences are subtle at first. A photograph goes up on a local website, a child’s name attached to a spelling-bee victory. The parent who was too busy, too distracted, too trusting now realises their child’s digital footprint has begun without their blessing. In another case, sensitive information is shared between agencies because the absence of a “no” was interpreted as a resounding “yes.” Suddenly, families find themselves caught between embarrassment and frustration. Schools may argue that nobody complained at the time, forgetting that silence is not the same as approval.
From a data privacy lens, implied consent is a dangerous slope. It risks teaching children —ironically, the very people schools are meant to educate— that consent is not something active and deliberate but something you stumble into by failing to object. This undermines everything we try to instil about personal agency. In an era where we tell teenagers not to share pictures unless they are comfortable with the consequences, how do we square the hypocrisy of institutions doing the opposite?
And yes, we can laugh at the absurdity. Picture the PTA meeting: “Since no parent objected, we’ve decided to livestream sports day to TikTok.” Or the class WhatsApp group: “We assumed you didn’t mind if your children’s essays were uploaded to ChatGPT for training purposes.” The very absurdity exposes the fragility of relying on assumptions.
This isn’t to vilify schools — they are already burdened with more than their fair share of responsibility. But it is to provoke debate. Should we continue to tolerate a model of consent that no other sector would dare use? If a hospital treated implied consent with the same casualness, lawsuits would be endless. If banks operated this way, half of us would wake up having “agreed” to a mortgage. Schools deserve empathy, but children deserve better.
The answer isn’t more paperwork, but better systems: clear opt-ins, digital platforms that make explicit choice quick and painless, and above all a cultural shift where asking for permission is not seen as a bureaucratic drag but a moral necessity. Because when we normalise implied consent in the schoolyard, we risk raising a generation who will carry that same shrug into adulthood. And one day, when they are the ones running institutions, the silence we taught them may echo back at us in ways we can’t control.
Michael Irene, CIPM, CIPP(E) certification, is a data and information governance practitioner based in London, United Kingdom. He is also a Fellow of Higher Education Academy, UK, and can be reached via moshoke@yahoo.com; twitter: @moshoke
