Schools Implementing Fingerprint Scanning

A school, in the South of Wales, has recently began the implementation of a new scheme in which it aims to fingerprint the 1,400 attending pupils in a bid to automate class registrations.

Parents of the children that attend the school, in Porth County, were notified little more than a week before the scheme was put into practice. The headmaster of the school defends the decision, claiming that

“it wasn’t necessary for us to seek parental consent in this. It’s a system that has been approved by the DfES and it’s supported by Capita SIMS…..There are 1,400 students in the school and we had two phone calls…the parents were perfectly happy.”

The system, known as VeriCool, is developed by a sector of General Dynamics, and aims to provide biometric scanning for each classroom. General Dynamics is best known for specialising in producing systems for the military and intelligence services.

The move has met with much controversy, with parents and privacy advocates airing their concerns. David Clouter of leavethemkidsalone argued that taking the register was an important way for teachers to establish contact with each individual pupil at the start of a class and that its role would not substitute manual registers, for instance, in the case of a fire.

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Note: Interestingly, I was recently speaking to a driving instructor. I have been wondering, for some time now, why plastic ID card driving liscences have been introduced when drivers are still required to carry the paper counter-part. The instructor informed me that the common theory is that it is part of the initial phase of the governments biometric national ID card scheme. The idea being that we will put up less of a fight if we are already used to carry an ID card of sorts - a way of slowly introducing us to the idea of a full national ID scheme / database. Coupled with the reported incident of schools implementing fingerprint scanning systems, we clearly ARE slipping further towards that Orwellian society that we resent so much.