Introduction: the new school year, one giant form
Every September, millions of families sign more documents in three days than they do in the rest of the year combined. Information sheet, permission to leave the premises, image rights, sign-up for the digital workspace, registration for the canteen, after-school study, school transport, the parents' association. All of it scribbled in a corridor, between two meetings, with a borrowed pen.
We devote plenty of articles to disciplining our phones and limiting the traces we leave behind voluntarily. But there is one category of data we produce on someone else's behalf, and can never take back: our children's. A pupil starting nursery school in 2026 will leave secondary school in 2039 with a digital file made up of teacher comments, photographs, canteen swipe times, national assessment results and login records on platforms hosted somewhere nobody can quite specify.
This guide is for parents who want neither to turn their child into an administrative outcast, nor to blindly sign whatever is handed to them. It sets out what schools can legally require, what merely serves the institution's convenience, and where the line falls — often blurred, sometimes flatly ignored.
What schools actually collect
Mandatory data
France's national education system operates massive data processing operations, governed by decrees published in the Journal officiel. The main ones:
- ONDE (the digital tool for school management), for primary education: identity, date and place of birth, address, legal guardians, INE (national pupil identifier).
- SIECLE, its secondary-school equivalent, which feeds report cards, absence records and grant applications.
- The Livret scolaire unique (LSU), which records learning outcomes from the first year of primary school through to the end of lower secondary.
- National assessments (years 2, 3, 7 and 9 equivalents), whose individual results are passed up to the DEPP, the ministry's statistics directorate.
These operations rest on a public interest mission: you cannot object to them, and there is nothing particularly illegitimate about them. An education system needs to know who is enrolled where.
The INE, on the other hand, deserves attention: this number follows a pupil from nursery school right through to higher education and serves as a matching key between databases, including Parcoursup. It is one of the rare national identifiers that spans two decades of a person's life.
The optional data everyone assumes is mandatory
This is where the real game is played. On the standard information sheet handed out at the start of the year, a significant number of boxes are not mandatory:
| Information requested | Actual status |
|---|---|
| Parents' occupations | Optional (collected for statistical purposes) |
| Social security number | Irrelevant in most cases |
| Personal email address | Optional if another channel exists |
| Pupil photograph for internal class directory | Subject to consent |
| Authorisation to publish images | Freely given consent, revocable |
| Medical information outside a formal care plan | Optional |
The CNIL regularly points out that data collection must be adequate, relevant and limited (the data minimisation principle, Article 5 of the GDPR). Leaving a box blank is not an offence. Nobody has ever been summoned for failing to state their job.
Practical tip: rather than angrily crossing out a box, write "not provided". The administrative effect is identical, and the effect on relationships is considerably better.
Image rights: the most misunderstood box in the country
What the law actually says
A minor's image is protected by Article 9 of the French Civil Code and, since 2018, by the GDPR. Publishing an identifiable photograph requires authorisation from both holders of parental authority. An authorisation given in September for "the whole school year, all media" is legally shaky: consent must be specific, informed, and revocable at any time.
In practice, most school forms lump together three very different uses:
- Internal educational use: display in the classroom, class scrapbook, end-of-year exhibition for families. Low risk.
- Publication on the school website or digital workspace: sometimes publicly accessible and indexable by search engines. Medium to high risk.
- School social media accounts, local press, promotional brochures: uncontrollable, permanent distribution. High risk.
You are perfectly entitled to accept the first and refuse the other two. That is precisely what the GDPR envisages: consent granted per purpose. If the form offers only a single "yes / no" box, nothing stops you from adding a handwritten note: "Consent for internal classroom use only; publication online or on social media is refused."
The case of class photos
The school photographer is a private contractor. They are the data controller for the data they collect, and they must have a legal basis for retaining faces, names and orders. Two questions worth putting to the head teacher or the school fund committee:
- How long does the contractor keep the files?
- Are the individual portraits hosted on an online portal accessible via a shared password?
The second point is the more troubling one: tens of thousands of identified children's portraits, sitting on an ordering portal protected by a code handed out to an entire school, amounts to a remarkably poorly guarded database.
For families who want a record of the school years without entrusting it to a contractor, a plain printed photo album remains unbeatable: nothing leaks, nothing is indexed, nothing ends up in an artificial intelligence training set.
Digital workspaces, Pronote and friends: everyday surveillance
What the school's digital workspace records
Digital workspaces (Toutatice, Mon Bureau Numérique, ENT77, Skolengo and the rest) and school management software such as Pronote or EcoleDirecte keep far more than marks:
- a timestamp for every login, by parent and pupil alike;
- whether documents have been opened or not (the notorious "read / unread");
- internal messaging between families and teachers;
- absences, late arrivals, sanctions, sometimes visits to the school nurse;
- work submitted, submission dates, successive versions.
These platforms fall under the responsibility of the local authority (region, department or municipality) and the school. You therefore have the right of access under Article 15 of the GDPR: you can request a copy of the data concerning your child, including the login logs. Address the request to the head teacher, copying in the data protection officer (DPO) of your regional education authority — every rectorat appoints one, and their address appears on the authority's website.
The blind spot: "handy" tools that were never vetted
The real problem is almost never the official digital workspace. It's the peripheral tools adopted in good faith by a teacher: a free video conferencing service, an American quiz app, a group set up on a consumer messaging platform, a personal file-sharing folder.
The CNIL and the ministry have repeatedly pointed out — notably in the recommendations on "collaborative tools" circulated to regional education authorities — that free consumer software suites are not compliant for school use, because transfers of data cannot be controlled. Reality on the ground is considerably more relaxed than the official line.
You can politely ask a teacher which tool your child's data travels through, and suggest an alternative (uploading to the digital workspace, work submitted on paper). In the vast majority of cases, the request is granted without any drama.
Canteen, gates, lockers: biometrics move in
School catering has quietly become a testing ground. Contactless badges, hand-geometry recognition, sometimes facial recognition "to speed up the queue".
The CNIL's position is consistent and well known: biometrics in schools are disproportionate. In 2019, the administrative court in Marseille annulled the decision by the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region authorising facial recognition at the entrance to two secondary schools, holding that pupils' consent could not be freely given within a relationship of authority, and that the objective could be achieved by less intrusive means. That ruling remains the reference point.
In practical terms: a conventional badge or a code is always enough. If a biometric system is proposed, it must be optional and an equivalent alternative must exist. Ask for it in writing; it almost always appears in the contractor's contract, it's simply that nobody claims it.
Protecting your own identity as a parent
School doesn't just expose your child. It exposes you.
Parent groups
The class group set up on a consumer messaging app is the first leak. By joining a group of thirty parents, you hand your personal phone number to thirty strangers, some of whom will save it in an address book synced with the servers of an advertising platform. That number is very often the same one attached to your bank accounts, your official identity and your deliveries.
Three countermeasures, in ascending order of robustness:
- Use a messaging app that hides your number behind a username (Signal now lets you communicate via a username without revealing your number; Element/Matrix requires no number at all).
- Set aside a second line — a prepaid SIM or a second number in a dual-SIM phone — for everything to do with community life: school, sports club, associations, car-sharing.
- For one-off, sensitive exchanges (flagging something to another parent without opening a conversation), an anonymous text message avoids opening a permanent channel to your main line.
School conflicts and the need for discretion
Reporting a problem — bullying between pupils, an adult's behaviour, something going wrong in the canteen — puts a parent in an awkward position: they will have to run into everyone at the school gates for years afterwards.
A few pointers:
- A report addressed to the regional director of education services (DASEN) or the rectorat does not have to be forwarded with your name attached to the school; ask for this explicitly in your letter.
- 3018 (school bullying and cyberbullying) and 119 (children at risk) accept anonymous calls.
- A soberly worded, factual, dated registered letter is worth more than ten messages in a group chat. Keep a copy: a compact portable scanner or a simple dated digital folder is enough to build a solid record.
The useful instinct: within a school community, total anonymity is an illusion, but controlled traceability is achievable. The aim isn't to disappear — it's to decide for yourself what is attributable, and to whom.
Screens at home: consistency rather than surveillance
School goes digital, and home follows. Many families react by installing highly intrusive parental control tools that log location continuously, read messages and capture screens. The paradox is complete: you protect your child from commercial data harvesting by handing their entire life to an app developer.
The recommendations of the French screens commission delivered in 2024, like the guidance from Santé publique France, focus less on surveillance than on the framework: times, places, shared use. A few practical choices contribute more than any spyware:
- a programmable plug timer for the Wi-Fi router, cutting access overnight without collecting any data at all;
- a traditional alarm clock in the bedroom, which removes the argument for keeping a phone on the bedside table;
- an adhesive webcam cover on the family computer, three euros well spent to settle a vague anxiety once and for all;
- books on digital literacy, to read yourself before discussing the subject with a teenager who often knows more than you do.
What these solutions have in common: they create no new data. A rule beats a tracker.
Summary: six start-of-year moves
- Reread the information sheet and leave the optional boxes blank (occupation, secondary email, medical details outside a formal individual care plan).
- Separate out the image authorisations: yes to internal use, no to online publication and social media, adding a handwritten note if the form makes no provision for it.
- Ask the school which digital tools are used and how long school photos are retained.
- Refuse any biometric system and request the badge or code alternative.
- Compartmentalise your phone number: a dedicated line for community life, a username in messaging apps, an anonymous text for one-off exchanges.
- File an access request once, out of curiosity, with your education authority's DPO: it's free, it takes ten minutes, and it will teach you a great deal about what is actually stored.
Conclusion: thirteen years is a long time
A school record is not just another file. It is the first continuous archive of a person, compiled while they are a minor, fed by adults, and rarely deleted on time. The ONDE and SIECLE systems set retention periods, but the reality of backups, exports, contractor portals and forgotten school websites left online is infinitely more porous.
You will not achieve a data-free school career. You can achieve one in which every piece of data was discussed rather than simply endured — and pass on, along the way, the one instinct that will really matter to your child in 2039: asking why, before signing.
Further reading: the CNIL's "Education" fact sheets, the Éduscol portal on data protection in schools, and the recommendations of the French Children's Rights Defender on children's rights in the digital environment.
