Surveillance in schools - today's Guardian

[Soulfish]

Well we have 0 CCTV cameras and don't take any biometrics currently - although that looks set to change with the cashless catering demo we had today!

Does that make us saints?

[Robz]

Well we have 0 CCTV cameras and don't take any biometrics currently - although that looks set to change with the cashless catering demo we had today!

Does that make us saints?

wow, to work somewhere like that must be nice, you obviously don't get much trouble to warrant cctv?

[Soulfish]

wow, to work somewhere like that must be nice, you obviously don't get much trouble to warrant cctv?

In the year that I've been here theres been a handful of vandalism incidents and a handful of items that have gone missing. In general it's pretty good. I've had one inkjet that's been destroyed due to paperclips/staples being fed into it and one laptop that's been stolen (although the Office had been left unlocked!) in that time.

I know my line manager would love to put in some CCTV but convincing the governors that it's needed and getting the budget to do it are entirely different

[rh91uk]

In the year that I've been here theres been a handful of vandalism incidents and a handful of items that have gone missing. In general it's pretty good. I've had one inkjet that's been destroyed due to paperclips/staples being fed into it and one laptop that's been stolen (although the Office had been left unlocked!) in that time.

I know my line manager would love to put in some CCTV but convincing the governors that it's needed and getting the budget to do it are entirely different

Your forgetting, Soulfish - the incident with the ricoh printer and the tippex.

[Dancer]

....the finger prints taken by schools are for the library or cashless catering system, and cant be used to identify the kids......

Surely the purpose of the finger print is to identify the student.

[Mr.Ben]

Your forgetting, Soulfish - the incident with the ricoh printer and the tippex.

I thought that was the blonde with tippex on the computer monitor?

Sorry Girls.....

[enjay]

Surely the purpose of the finger print is to identify the student.

Yes, of course - what they meant was that they're not stored in such any way that would allow you to lift a finger-print (CSI-style!) and then scan it and get told whose it is.

Also, the scans used for cashless catering and such like have a lot less points of reference than the Police use (can't remember the numbers), meaning that they aren't sufficient to uniquely identify someone, merely narrow it down to one in several tens of thousands. If Police fingerprinting made a match on only the same number of points of reference, it would actually be inadmissible in court.

When you look at the facts - something which this "researcher" failed to do - you would see it isn't all that scary, after all.