Privacy has been defined as “the protective buffer within which people can avoid another party’s taking something from them, keeping watch over them, or entering into their lives in a way that is both unwelcome and undesirable”. It is a premise of this paper that such a position needs to be taken very seriously in contemporary society, and particularly in the case of schools, as school personnel have the capacity to engage in practices which show great disregard for individual and family privacy. This is illustrated in the case of primary school education in the Republic of Ireland. Particular attention is paid to assessment, pedagogical and curricular practices that derive from patterns of systematic and mandatory disclosure that are confessional, performative and public.