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Take CCTV out of the classroom

If constant surveillance is the norm for Britain's schoolchildren, what will the future look like?

On a recent visit to a secondary school in Greater Manchester, I was informed that I would have to have my fingerprints taken if I wanted to buy a sandwich in the school canteen. It seems that in the 60 years since George Orwell prophesied of a totalitarian future in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother style surveillance and identity controls have become the norm for the next generation. Fingerprint scanners have been used in school canteens and libraries since the early 2000s. Alongside this has been the rapid growth of CCTV in both communal areas and classrooms. As Leia Clancy and Sam Goodman pointed out last week, teaching and learning classrooms are fitted with cameras and microphones that transmit lessons to the school computer network to monitor the teacher's performance. Surveillance equipment is also installed in school classrooms as a way of identifying disruptive pupils.

Over the next 10 to 15 years the majority of English secondary schools will be rebuilt or renewed as part of the building schools for the future programme. Investment in information and communications technology is integral to this reform. However the significant investment coming from private finance means schools are increasingly dictated to by private sector partners who will subsequently acquire expensive contracts for services such as catering and security. Classwatch, a firm selling surveillance equipment to schools, market their "classroom management systems" as a teaching aid and way to "manage behaviour". Another company, Cunninghams, promotes fingerprinting systems "to improve efficiency, monitor healthy eating and remove the free school meal stigma". With government backing, the sway that business has over schools is resulting in an explosion in the use of technologies, making Orwell's prophesies of social control through "constant surveillance" seem like an increasingly realistic prediction. "Schools are told the technology is efficient and good for them and have it sold to them quite hard" says Sandra Leaton Gray, lecturer in education at the University of East Anglia. "There's a lot of money to be made in schools."

Concerned parents are countering this hard sell. The campaign group, Leave Them Kids Alone, is angry about the use of biometrics and says that consent is not always sought from parents. They are seeking legislation to force schools to obtain prior explicit informed consent from parents before taking biometrics from their children. Amanda Brown, head of employment conditions and rights at the National Union of Teachers agrees, saying that fingerprinting systems "should be based on voluntary participation with full consultation with staff, parents and children".

With recent government mishaps demonstrating the vulnerability of information, parents are understandably troubled about how easy it is for their children's biometric data to be hacked into. Once taken, fingerprints are converted into a number, and companies selling the technology claim that the process cannot be reversed. However, advances in technology mean it is impossible to say whether data will remain secure and parents are worried that fingerprint records will not be destroyed once their children have left school. Unlike pin numbers, a fingerprint can never be changed so if an error is made at any point there is a risk that it would follow the child for life.

Twenty-five years on from Orwell's prophetic year, parents and academics also fear that the next generation will be less likely to question how they are being controlled. Professor Ross Anderson, an expert in security engineering at Cambridge University believes "some people in the Home Office like the idea of getting them young. Get children used, from an earlier stage, to the idea that they should have their fingerprints scanned. Kids are being softened up." If the control of government backed private finance in schools means that pervasive technologies are increasingly becoming the accepted norm for the next generation, what will the future look like in another 25 years?

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