pumpkinstrokemarrow

Then over the tea-time kippers, we pondered about some stuff in today's Guardian about how the surveillance state has reached our schools.

The first bit of Guardian outrage we spotted was about the use of finger print machines to support library and canteen services. Which did not strike me as such a bad idea. Finger print machines are not intrusive, they are hard to cheat and remove the need for children to carry tickets or plastic - which they are apt to lose or forget. They also get to learn about a bit of technology. One could build the stuff into lessons. Assuming that the technology is indeed value for money, that it does what it says on the tin, why not?

Perhaps because it is presumably a lot dearer than the bar code technology used by Surrey Libraries - which works fine, but which does require you to carry your bar code around with you. Which I do, all the time. Tucked behind the plastic. So I do wonder about value for money.

The second bit of outrage was about the use of CCTV everywhere, in some cases justified by a rather unlikely yarn about how useful they were in the support of teacher training. This we found rather unsettling, BH (who used to be a teacher) more than me (or should I say I at this point?). What have we come to that we need to film our children at their lessons, never mind in their toilets and changing rooms?

I had the same sort of unease about the DT desire to open up civil servant claims for travel and subsistence to public scrutiny. OK, so there is some abuse, but the amount of money involved is probably fairly small in the scheme of things. Do we really want to be worrying about how every bit of T&S is going to look when printed up by an unfriendly newspaper? Would this be a good use of management time? And I would be surprised to find that civil service T&S is much out of line with what goes on in the private sector. And where would such intrusion stop? Would the DT want to move into the HR arena? Give newspapers the right to second guess all sorts of management decisions in that area?

Presumably private schools with their more robust attitude to expulsion and their more committed parents do not feel the same need for the surveillance state. Not that that helps the rest of us. Or the sales boys and girls who peddle it all.

The Guardian, being a newspaper, confined itself to how awfuls about all the surveillance. I did not spot anything about how better to address the issues which prompt schools to go in for it.