There is a difference between being shocked and being surprised. I thought of that as I read the news that disabled children had been “erased” from their class photo in a primary school in Aberdeenshire.
A photographer is said to have taken separate pictures: one with the children with “additional needs” and one without. Parents were then given both versions to choose from. Reportedly, a set of twins was split up. The child who uses a wheelchair was excluded from one photo, while their twin, who isn’t disabled, was photographed with the rest of the class.
If that feels somewhat chilling, it is because it should. Few of us – even at a time when someone, somewhere will always find a way to excuse bigotry – cannot understand the connotations of wanting to pretend disabled children don’t exist.
Indeed, in recent days the incident has been resolved with a swift consensus. The news went viral. The public expressed its outrage online. The photography company offered an apology. Lessons will be learned.
And yet this is neither the beginning nor the end of the story. One photographer did not invent ableism and the way those disabled children were treated that day will not be the first time such attitudes have bled into our schools.
Over the past few days, I have heard of a number of cases of disabled children across the UK who have been “edited” in their school photo. Some have had their disability aids removed by photographers. Other children have been altered with editing software or banned from their class photos entirely.
One parent from Glasgow told me how, last year, her son’s class photo was digitally altered to hide his disability. Autism means he has a fear of having his photo taken and “crosses his eyes” to avoid it. Instead of showing this, his mum says the photographer doctored the photo. “His original image was cropped out and another picture of him added in,” she told me. “[In the edited image] he’s not even facing the same direction as the class.”
Another parent in Glasgow described how her nine-year-old daughter – who has diabetes – has been asked “every year” by the school photographer to hide the insulin pump that sits around her waist. “She told the photographer what it was and that she couldn’t take it off, so they asked her to slide it round the back where it couldn’t be seen,” her mum says. “‘Must look normal’ is the mantra for school photography regardless of the effect on these kids.”
In Kent, one teacher told me of the time her teaching assistant saw a photographer ask a four-year-old autistic pupil to remove their glasses for the class photo. “Despite the TA protesting, the photographer still took the child’s glasses,” she says.
Another mum, this time in Leeds, told me that her autistic daughter was excluded entirely from her school photo. Having previously been bullied, she was isolated and taught from a “hub” alongside a child with Down’s syndrome and other pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (Send). One day, the family received a generic invoice for a school photo but her daughter said she hadn’t had one taken. “I rang the school and they told me that the photographer ‘didn’t take pictures of the children in the hub’,” she says. “They meant disabled children.”
These are, of course, first-hand accounts and not large-scale data, but it seems likely this is just the tip of the iceberg. As one teacher put it to me, “The reason I want to speak out is that the recent issue in Scotland is not a one-off mistake by a rogue photographer but rather a systemic culture of creating ‘perfect’ pictures without any disabilities shown.”
“Perfect pictures” have become part of our daily lives. The way we take photographs has changed rapidly over the past decade. As the furore over the Princess of Wales’s Mother’s Day photo recently showed, it has become the norm to edit images, to rid them of any so-called imperfections. Perhaps it is not surprising that this would eventually expand into “real-life” editing. But this treatment of disabled pupils is not a new phenomenon. In recent days, I’ve heard from disabled adults who were at school between the 1970s and the 2000s who experienced the same thing: one woman was excluded from her school yearbook because she had a cane; a wheelchair user was forced to sit in a “normal chair” for their class photo. Disabled children have long been airbrushed out of school records – technology has just made it easier.
This is not simply about the superficial trope that disability is too ugly to be seen or a negative that is best erased, though that is certainly a part. It is about the unspoken belief that disabled people do not quite belong in public spaces. That it is acceptable – perhaps even preferable – to segregate them from other, “normal people”. Barely a few hours before the school story broke, the actor Sally Phillips spoke of how her son Olly, who has Down’s syndrome, was denied access to a trampoline park. The organisers – who allegedly told Phillips someone with his condition would need a letter from a GP to gain entry – said they were “deeply sorry” Olly could not take part and was left disappointed, and that they were following safety guidance from British Gymnastics. As Phillips noted, it’s as if “they’re weeding out people with visible disabilities”.
Such treatment has not come out of nowhere. These are the same attitudes that see Send pupils left to languish at home without a school place or a wheelchair user forced to wet herself on a train because public transport is still not accessible. As I say, shocking but not surprising.
What happened in a classroom in Aberdeenshire, then, was not an anomaly; an unpleasant but otherwise rare blight on a tolerant and equal country. It is a particularly blatant example of what disabled people endure daily, in every office, every social media platform, every university. It is the man who leers at a woman sat in a wheelchair at a bar to inform her, “You’d be pretty if you weren’t in that chair, love.” It is the troll on X who sees a disabled celebrity on television and picks up his iPhone to tell her people like her shouldn’t be allowed out.
That is the thing with true ugliness. It does not come in the shape of a wheelchair, a cleft lip, white cane or scars. It sits in prejudice, digging and clawing its way into our culture until one day the nice man who is taking your child’s school photo asks her to hide her hearing aids. That this prejudice will follow these children into adulthood is perhaps the bleakest part. If only society had the desire to edit that out.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
