Ed Blog / Writing About Students Without Exposing Them

Small Cohorts Make Anonymising Harder Than It Looks

In a group of twelve, almost any distinguishing feature is effectively a name.

Anonymising assumes a crowd to disappear into. Much teaching does not have one. In a small class, a specialist course, a workshop with a single intake or a training cohort in a narrow field, the population of people who could plausibly be the subject is tiny, and every detail you add cuts it further. Two or three neutral-sounding facts in combination can reduce a group of twelve to one, and the people best placed to perform that reduction are precisely the people in the room: classmates, colleagues, family.

This means the test cannot be whether a stranger could identify the person. Strangers rarely can, and their inability is no comfort to somebody whose peers recognised them in the third paragraph. The workable test is whether a person who knows your setting could identify the subject, and in a small cohort the honest answer is usually yes, unless you have written at a level of generality that keeps the individual out of view entirely.

So the smaller the group, the more general the writing has to be. That may feel like a loss and it need not be, because the interesting content was rarely the individual anyway. It was what you did and why, and that survives generalisation intact. Write about the approach, the sequence, the adjustment. Never write about an identifiable person's difficulty, struggle or failure; there is no version of that which is yours to publish, whatever the writing would gain from it.