- Fingerprinting is being introduced in thousands of UK Primary Schools as part of a subsidised library package called Junior Librarian that they have purchased, encouraged by central government. New schools are joining the scheme at the rate of around 20 a week. To date, more than 3500 schools and nurseries (manufacturer's official figure, given to the Daily Mirror) have fingerprinted and photographed 3/4 million children, ranging in age from 3 to 11; impressionable, trusting and naive.
- This is always done without explicit parental consent, and even in some cases, without parental knowledge. Schools strongly resist sending parents the opt-in consent slips that are used for just about everything else. Some parents only find out AFTERWARDS when they ask their children "what did you do at school today?"
- The whole scheme may be illegal. And at least one Local Education Authority has already sent out guidelines to all its schools restricting the use of biometrics without express parental consent. But since governing bodies and headteachers have responsibility for many decisions on their school budgets, neither Ministers nor the Department for Education nor Local Education Authorities have any way of knowing just how many schools under their jurisdiction are fingerprinting the children in their care.
- Schools are not nearly secure enough to perform biometric scans (airports and banks spend millions on their security). There is a real danger that children's fingerprints could be stolen, and this could affect them for the rest of their lives (eg for passports and bank accounts) since unlike a PIN number, a fingerprint cannot ever be changed.
- Fingerprinting 5-year-olds without asking parents has become a multi-million pound business. Some of the companies involved in school biometrics use some very questionable sales techniques, and have close links with the US military and even the interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.
- Data held on these systems is not protected by the Data Protection Act and may fall under the provisions of the Children Act 2004 which allows data on every child in the UK to be accessed and shared by a wide range of government officials including police, teachers, GPs and social workers, without parents' consent or even knowledge. Head Teachers have no power to overrule this, so any well-intentioned assurances they may give parents about data sharing are worthless. One system, Junior Librarian, "even has a report specifically designed for school inspections".
- There is no hard evidence of any lasting educational benefit from fingerprinting children. Aside from anecdotal claims in manufacturers' glossy brochures, no independent research on this has ever been carried out. In addition, the manufacturers have admitted their systems work just as well without the biometric scanning, and some parents and teachers have claimed they even work better without.
- As schools increasingly come to rely on biometric systems like Junior Librarian in their day to day management, they become ever more impersonal and anonymous, and vital teacher pupil interaction is lost.
- Some experts claim that one side effect of fingerprinting small children, whether intentional or not, is to condition them to accept without question Big Brother-style biometric tracking in later life. And without wishing to seem alarmist, the last time young children were fingerprinted en masse without the express consent of their parents was during the Second World War.
- The whole issue needs to be debated openly. Schools are very reluctant to do this. Many even try to cloud the issue by referring to "using your thumb", "fingertip registration", or "fingerswipe system" in a seemingly bizarre attempt to hide the fact that they are simply fingerprinting children without express consent. The police, who presumably know about these things, call the systems they use "fingerprint scanners", and use them to catch criminals.
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