When setting up relatives on Tapestry, it’s important to consider safeguarding and data protection. This guide covers the key points to help you decide what measures to use on your account.
First, here are the main data protection points:
GDPR does not stop you from adding children’s or relative’s personal data to Tapestry, but you must have a lawful basis for doing so. You can read about the different lawful bases and how to document them on the ICO website.
If your lawful basis is consent and you need example consent forms, you can find them in the forum resources section here. If you need help, email customer.service@eyfs.info.
Accessing the Tapestry Contract
For details on where Tapestry data is stored and how it is protected, check the Tapestry contract. Managers can download it from Help → Account → Your Contract. If you aren’t a manager on Tapestry, you can find a copy on this page.
Once you have a lawful basis for adding children’s and relatives’ data, you can consider the safeguarding implications of setting up relatives. Below, I cover individual observations, group observations, and some common safeguarding FAQs.
Individual Observations
On Tapestry parents can only see observations made by staff that their child has been included in and only after it has been published in their child’s journal. If an observation hasn’t been published, it will show as not in journal on the main observations page.
When you add relatives to your account, they must be attached to their children manually (unless they have been imported from your MIS). This is a safeguarding feature to ensure no relatives end up seeing children that they shouldn’t. This tutorial explains how you can attach relatives to children.
Multiple relative accounts can be linked to each child. This is so mum and dad (and granny, grandad, and aunty) can all have their own access. Usually, relatives of the same child can see what each other post, but you can set permissions to stop that if you’d like.
To check on your account whether relatives can view observations made by other relatives of the same child, or whether they can comment on observations, you just need to go to the User Permissions section from Configuration → Relatives → Relative User Permissions. See this tutorial for more details.
One thing to note with published observations (these are the ones that relatives can see) is that if a staff member edits it and either doesn’t have permission to publish observations or chooses not to, this will take the observation back to being ‘not in journal’. Therefore, if a relative has commented or liked the observation before it was edited, it can look like they have done this for an unapproved observation. If it looks like a relative has liked or commented on an unapproved observation, please don’t worry.
You can check this is what has happened by going into the observation on the browser version of Tapestry and clicking on the View History button.
This will then give you a list of everything that has happened with this observation. You can see below what this would look like if an observation has been published, commented on by a relative and then edited by a staff member to take it back to not being in the child’s journal.
With individual observations it’s also important to remember that if other children are in the background of a photo, they will be seen by any relatives of the child’s observation it is. Any of the settings that can apply to group observations which might stop this don’t apply to individual observations. In these cases, you would need to use the edit tool to crop or blur the photo in question to remove other children.
I’ll cover the mentioned group settings below.
Group Observations
It is possible on Tapestry to add observations for groups of children; when the observation is published it will be visible to all relatives who have a child included in it. Therefore, there are a few things you will need to think about regarding safeguarding. These are:
- Media added to the observation
- Relatives being able to comment on the observation
- The notes you have written within the observation
Media
There is a setting on Tapestry, enabled by default, which hides media in group observations for relatives. If you have a lawful basis for allowing parents to see media within a group observation, which might be that parents have given their consent for other relatives to see photos of their child, then you can disable this setting. Do bear in mind that this is a blanket setting, so it will apply to all media in all group observations.
Whilst you can set permissions individually, when you do this, it applies to the relatives, rather than the children. This means if you set it so only some relatives can’t see media in group observations, their linked children will still show up in photos and videos, they just won’t be able to see them. Permitted relatives would still be able to see these children in media.
To disable this option, you just need to go to the Configuration → Relatives → Relative User Permissions and when you see the option View group observation media, click on the Edit button.
This will then present you with a pop-up where you can set this to permitted.
Comments
If you have allowed relatives to comment on observations for their child, you will then need to decide if you want them to be able to comment on group observations. If you do allow this, when parents comment on a group observation, it’s important to know that other relatives with children included in the observation will be able to view these comments, as well as the relative’s full name. This means relatives might be able to work out which children are included in the observation based on who has commented on it.
To set whether relatives have permission to comment on group observations on your account, you just need to go to the User Permissions section in the Configuration menu.
If you do decide to allow relatives to do this, whilst Tapestry will warn relatives if an observation is a group one before they comment on it (see below picture), we would also recommend that you tell the parents to ensure they are aware of this.
Notes
You can decide whether relatives see comments and media within group observations, but they will always see the notes. You will need to bear that in mind when you are writing up your observation. For example, are you including any personal details that you might need to change?
If there is anything you want to include in notes which you don’t want relatives to see, you can use the additional information field instead. This is an additional text field (see the image below) that you can enable and use for staff-only notes.
To set it so relatives can’t see this, you need to go to Configuration → Relatives → Relatives User Permissions → Observations and find the option View ‘Additional Information’ and click on the Edit button to set this as not permitted.
Safeguarding FAQs
I’m now going to go over some of the FAQs we get about safeguarding with parents and photos on Tapestry.
Can we set it so children can be automatically blurred?
In some situations, such as a parent not giving their consent for other relatives to see photos of their child, settings want to be able to select children that will be automatically blurred in photos that could be seen by other relatives. Whilst this is something we would like to offer, it’s not something currently available on Tapestry as an automation.
In this situation you could think about using the setting I mentioned earlier, that hides media in group observation from relatives. You can find this within the User Permissions.
Otherwise, you can simply use crop or blur them using Tapestry’s picture editing tool. This is available after uploading a photo or when editing an observation by selecting View/Edit and then opening the image.
Can relatives download media?
Yes. Anything a relative can see, they can get a copy of. Unfortunately, it is not possible to stop this. They can right click on media to save copies of it, screenshot their screen to make a copy of it (although some android devices do not allow that), or, as they could with paper journals, take a picture with another device.
If you want to make it a bit easier for relatives to download photos and videos from observations, there is a setting you can enable which will offer them a link so they can quickly do this within an observation.
The setting, see a ‘download media’ button, is enabled from Configuration → Relatives → Relative User Permissions → Observations → See a “download media” button→ Select Edit → Set to Permitted.
If you don’t want relatives to share photos from Tapestry, on social media for example, we recommend that you make that clear to relatives and ask them to agree not to. One option is to say that if parents are found to be posting/sharing anything from Tapestry you will deactivate their login and ask that they come into your setting to view their child’s journal.
So, that’s everything we think you should consider before you set up relatives on your account! If you have any further questions please contact customer.service@eyfs.info.
Learn more about Tapestry and EYFS safeguarding.
