Guardian
Cameras in the toilets; CCTV in the classroom; pupils' fingerprints kept in a database . . . Can't happen here? Think again, because the surveillance state is quietly invading our schools
'Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that increasingly have come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the schools of the 21st century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence."
So reads a passage from the opening pages of Lockdown High, a new book by the San Francisco-based journalist Annette Fuentes. Subtitled "When the schoolhouse becomes the jailhouse", it tells a story that decisively began with the Columbine shootings of 1999, and from across the US, the text cites cases that are mind-boggling: a high-flying student from Arizona strip-searched because ibuprofen was not allowed under her school rules; the school in Texas where teachers can carry concealed handguns; and, most amazingly of all, the Philadelphia school that gave its pupils laptops equipped with a secret feature allowing them to be spied on outside classroom hours.
Just about all the schools Fuentes writes about are united by a belief in that most pernicious of principles, "zero tolerance". Their scanners, cameras and computer applications are supplied by a US security industry that seems to grow bigger and more insatiable every year. And as she sees it, their neurotic emphasis on security has plenty of negative results: it renders the atmosphere in schools tense and fragile, and in coming down hard on young people for the smallest of transgressions, threatens to define their life chances at an early age – because, as she puts it, "suspensions and academic failure are strong predictors of entry into the criminal justice system". There is also, of course, the small matter of personal privacy.
It would be comforting to think of all this as a peculiarly American phenomenon. But in the UK, we seem almost as keen on turning schools into authoritarian fortresses. Scores of schools have on-site "campus police officers." One in seven schools has insisted on students being fingerprinted so they can use biometric systems for the delivery of lunches and in school libraries. Security systems based on face recognition have already been piloted in 10 schools, and on-site police officers are now a common feature of the education system. Most ubiquitous of all are CCTV cameras: in keeping with our national love affair with video surveillance, 85% of secondary schools are reckoned to use it, even in changing rooms and toilets.
Just as the US is home to such school-security firms as ScholarChip and Raptor Technologies, so we have an array of companies who can equip schools with a truly Orwellian array of kit. BioStore offers fingerprint-based ID systems to schools and assures any potential takers that children's dabs are encrypted into "a string of numbers", that "cannot be used to recreate a fingerprint image" nor "used in a forensic investigation". CCTVanywhere's website features a hooded youth with a spraycan straight out of central casting and a claim that its cameras can help with help with everything from bullying to settling legal claims against staff. There is also Classwatch, a CCTV firm which claims it can "produce dramatic improvements in behaviour".
Until recently, its chairman was a Tory MP called Tim Loughton. As if to signal the links that run between such firms and our policymakers, he is now under-secretary of state for children.
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