Irena Barker reports:
Headteachers are set to incur the wrath of civil liberties campaigners after challenging new laws that would force them to seek permission from both parents to use children’s biometric data.
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) claims a new bill forcing them to gain consent would be a “huge bureaucratic burden” for schools operating technology such as fingerprint recognition systems for cardless libraries and cashless canteens.
The new Protection of Freedoms Bill also gives pupils in schools and colleges the right to refuse to give their biometric data and compels schools to make alternative provision for them.
The several thousand schools that already use the technology will also have to ask permission from parents retrospectively, even if their systems have been established for years.
Read more on TES Connect.
So basically, the position of the ASCL seems to be that no one should make them actually do what they should have done from the git go, and by golly, now that they’ve invested all of this money in collecting information, don’t go and ruin it for them by protecting the human rights of the thousands of students whose rights they’ve already run roughshod over.
What’s the UK equivalent of “Pound sand?” And that’s the polite/edited version of what I’m thinking right now.