How a Pontypridd rugby club rebuilt photo consent for 168 juniors

Rhian Pritchard is the club welfare officer at Pengarth RFC in Pontypridd, whose minis and juniors section runs 168 players from under-7 to under-16 on Sunday mornings. In October 2024 a volunteer posted an under-11 festival photo to the club's public Facebook page with all eleven players' full names in the caption. One of them was a child in foster care.

Where the club started

Rhian is a primary school teaching assistant who took on the welfare role in 2022, two seasons after her daughter started in the under-8s. The section has 14 volunteer age-group coaches and a public Facebook page with about 2,400 followers, most of them former players and parents.

Nobody had decided how photos worked. They just happened.

• Coaches took photos on their own phones at training, festivals and matches, and posted them to the age-group WhatsApp group, which for the under-12s had grown to 61 members over four seasons.
• The best ones went to the public Facebook page, posted by whichever of three volunteers had the login, often from the touchline during the game.
• Photo permission was one line on the joining form. Forms sat in a filing cabinet in the clubhouse, the oldest from 2016, and 23 players had never returned one.
• Nobody at pitch side could say which children did not have permission.

The October 2024 post was removed within an hour of the foster carer's call. By then it had been shared 37 times.

What was actually wrong?

Not the volunteer. She was doing what the club had always done.

The problem was that the consent, the list of who had refused, and the photos lived in three different places, and none of them were where the camera was. The NSPCC's guidance on photography and sharing images asks for written, dated consent from parents of under-16s, for children to be consulted themselves, and for a way to make sure whoever is taking photos knows who has not consented. Pengarth had a version of the first and none of the other two.

When Rhian audited the Facebook page that November, she found 1,047 photos of juniors posted since 2019. Most had names in the captions.

"Everyone assumed someone else had checked. The form said yes in 2016, the coach assumed the form was current, and the person posting assumed the coach knew. Nobody was being careless. There was just no point where anyone actually looked."

What Pengarth set up in Bitir

The committee agreed the new rules in the summer of 2025, following the same approach as our guide to photo and video consent for children's clubs, and the junior section moved its age groups into Bitir before the season started.

1. A private, invite-only channel per age group, replacing the nine WhatsApp groups. Families were invited by the coach, and anyone whose child had left was not.
2. One consent card on 1 September 2025 in every age-group channel, built from the Activity form's Parent consent starting point, with three separate questions: photos in the age-group channel, photos on the public page, and press or professional photography.
3. A question of their own for players 12 and over. The under-13 to under-16 players, who have their own accounts in their age-group channels, answered the public-page question themselves. Where a player said no and a parent said yes, the club went with the player.
4. A names rule that is not optional. Public posts carry first names only on team photos, no names on close-ups, and go up after the final whistle, never during.
5. Orange wristbands on match and festival days for players without photo consent, so the person with the camera knows at the moment it matters.
6. An updated joining agreement with the touchline rule for parents: photograph your own child as much as you like, and do not post other people's children publicly. Every family accepted the new version before the first Sunday.

One decision was unpopular. Two coaches wanted to keep posting live from festivals because it brought the page its biggest numbers. Rhian said no, and the committee backed her: a photo with the ground in the background, posted while the children are still on it, tells a stranger where they are right now.

What changed in the numbers?

Rhian compared the 2024-25 season with 2025-26, with the same age groups and almost the same coaches.

The consent answers were more varied than the old form had suggested. Of the 168, 162 said yes to photos in their age-group channel, 146 to the public page and 121 to press. Six players had no photo consent at all, and three of the older players said no to the public page while their parents had said yes.

The 312 removed photos were the ones that named a child in full or showed a child with no consent record. Two volunteers did the review over three evenings with the CSV export from the consent cards open next to the page.

The public page now carries six to eight posts a month instead of 30-odd, each checked against the list by one of two people. The age-group channels carry far more photos than the WhatsApp groups ever did, because coaches no longer worry about where they will end up.

"Parents get more photos of their own kids than they ever did. The difference is that the photos stay with the families who were there."

What Rhian does in Bitir

• Nine invite-only age-group channels where coaches share training and match photos with that squad's families only.
• An Activity form for photo consent each September, with pending families visible to the coach and the welfare officer.
• CSV export of consent answers for the safeguarding file and for checking public posts.
• A versioned joining agreement carrying the touchline photography rule for parents.
• Post removal by managers, so a photo can come down for everyone in seconds.
• Role permissions so coaches manage their own age group and only Rhian and the junior chair see every channel.

What she would tell another club

• Audit your public page before you write a policy. The number will settle the committee discussion.
• Ask three questions, not one. Plenty of families are happy for the squad to see a photo and not the internet.
• Ask the older children themselves, and go with their answer.
• Put the list where the camera is: on the coach's phone and on the child's wrist.
• Never post live. The match report can wait until everyone has gone home.

What's next

The senior women's section, which has three 16 and 17 year olds training with adults, wants the same consent card for next season. Rhian is also writing the September routine into the welfare officer's handover note, so whoever follows her inherits a card to resend rather than a filing cabinet.

Related reading: photo and video consent for children's clubs, and safeguarding-aware communication for youth groups.