Espoo school drops friend photos to reduce exclusion

Kuitinmäki School in Espoo will not offer friend photos during this autumn’s school photography session, Yle reports. Principal Terja Isokorpi said the decision aims to protect calm teaching schedules and prevent pupils from feeling excluded.

“In some situations, friend photos can cause feelings of exclusion. We want to promote a sense of community,” Isokorpi wrote to Yle by email.

Sibling photos will still be allowed because they are based on family relationships rather than pupils choosing one another. The school informed guardians of the decision through teachers, and Isokorpi said it had received no feedback from parents.

Schools decide on the extra product

Kuitinmäki is not the only school in Espoo to stop offering friend photos. Aurora School previously made a similar decision, citing anti-bullying work and the need to reduce inequality caused by differences in families’ ability to pay for extra photos.

Friend photos are a commercial extra product outside the basic photography packages typically covered by cities’ public contracts. Those packages usually include an individual portrait, a class photo and a sticker sheet. Each school ultimately decides whether to offer the additional service, which creates extra costs for families.

Tatjana Pajamäki, head of support services at the Mannerheim League for Children, said schools should assess everyday practices from the perspective of children who are most vulnerable.

She said situations in which children publicly choose partners, groups or teams always create a social risk for those experiencing exclusion.

“Loneliness and feelings of exclusion have a significant impact on children’s and young people’s wellbeing and mental health,” Pajamäki said. The league’s support services received 25,000 contacts last year, many concerning peer relationships, loneliness and exclusion. According to Pajamäki, these issues are often also linked to anxiety and depression.

Pajamäki said anti-bullying work should not be treated as a separate school project, but as a continuing assessment of small, everyday practices. If a school has found that certain situations repeatedly cause distress, she said she would trust the school’s own professionals to make decisions.

Photography company calls ban rare

Petri Karjalainen, chief executive of school photography company Kuvaverkko, said friend photos are one of the three main types of school photography, alongside class photos and individual portraits. Removing them therefore affects companies’ earnings.

Kuvaverkko is not responsible for Kuitinmäki School’s photography session. Karjalainen said he had heard of the removal of friend photos at only one school in Espoo, though he clarified that the case he knew about was not Kuitinmäki. The company does not keep regional statistics, but he described the practice as extremely rare nationwide.

“The cases known to us are isolated exceptions among more than 4,000 photography sessions held each year,” Karjalainen said.

Karjalainen said removing friend photos was not, by itself, a solution to school bullying. He said the main focus should be on how bullying is addressed in children’s everyday school life. Parents at other schools have contacted Kuvaverkko to ask why friend photos were unavailable, and the company has told them that the decision was made at the school’s own request.