08/09/2026
The world has changed. We have been giving careful thought to the use of children's images on our social channels.
Of course, we've always had to be careful that parental permissions were in place before using images of children to publicise Sunderland Ballet. But the rise of AI, and with it the ease with which images can be stolen and manipulated, has changed everything. Add to this, the likelihood of under 16s not having access to social media anyway in the future, and the nagging thought that maybe older teens and young adults might not want to see images of themselves in leotards from many years ago floating around on the internet, and we decided to make some changes.
From now on we are only going to use images where the children in them are not identifiable. (This does not apply to adults or older teens who mostly have social media accounts themselves anyway, and can give consent for images to be used.)
It's a difficult one. We are a small business and we have to be able to market what we do. But we also have a responsibility to our students. So we are busy auditing old images - and that will take a while since we've been going since 2011!
We are feeling our way with this, and we might not get every decision right. Please bear with us, and thank you for all your support ❤️
(And no, nothing bad has happened to prompt this decision. We just think it's time, and we think it's a conversation our industry needs to have.)
