School Surveillance in the dinner queue

A secondary school in Wakefield, Yorkshire, has introduced biometric fingerprint scanners to check what children and sixth-formers (apparently) are eating in the canteen. The system also apparently monitors that they are spending no more than they are allowed to.

The headteacher Mr Shevill cites efficiency as the main benefit, and the fact that print-outs can be obtained for what children have eaten.

This reminds me of the kind of system used in operations which grow plants or mushrooms in controlled enviroments where feeding systems and monitoring is all controlled by microprocessors.

Like all surveillance systems the preference is for a system which avoids human contact. It would of course be possible for the dinner ladies to ask a student for their name and look them up in a computer - if it is really necessary to be able to cap each child's lunch spend. A system like this means that the teachers - and Mr Shevill - know, without having to speak to a child, what they had for lunch. How efficient. How souless. And why do they need to be able to track and report on what the mushrooms children have had for lunch (going back over three weeks)? Surely it is the responsibility of the school to provide decent food in the first place?

'Efficiency' and depersonalisation go hand in hand. This is bizarre world. Mr Shevill can't even bring himself to ask a child what he had for lunch and would rather use an electronic monitoring system yet the students are no doubt still expected to grow up to be 'responsible citizens'. Where are children going to learn how to behave if all the adults in their lives are errecting barriers between them using surveillance systems ?

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