The Register reports:

The headmaster of Porth County Comprehensive School in South Wales has defended fingerprinting all 1,400 of his pupils days after their parents were told about the scheme last Wednesday.

[…]

Porth County Comprehensive headmaster Stephen Bowden told El Reg: “As far as we were concerned, it wasn’t necessary for us to seek parental consent in this. It’s a system that has been approved by the DfES and it’s supported by Capita SIMS.”

[…]

The system, called Vericool, was developed by Anteon, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, a firm that specialises in developing systems for the military and intelligence services.

It will register children for lessons by scanning their fingers when they enter a classroom at the start of a lesson.

Bowden said it would give the school a means of “effective administration” and help in “reducing the bureaucratic burden” of staff taking registrations themselves. It had cost the school £25,000.

“By the time I’ve put this together, I can assure any parent that their child is safely in school and on the premises…or we can purely or simply track students to see if attendance affects their progress,” he said.

But Bowden said he would not know how much more efficient the system would be than a manual register until after its installation was complete in January.

[…]

What a despicable creature this Stephen Bowden is. How utterly repugnant that someone in charge of educating a rolling total of 1400 children believes they should learn to be treated like unthinking livestock. What sort of example does it show to overrule or blatently disregard viewpoints of these children’s parents.

What a dangerous man he is to institutionally abuse so many children?

Now, of course the parents who have complained about this should remove their children from this school until this system is withdrawn, with a bit of luck they will have the sense to link this nonsense with the daily impositions that the National Identity Register will cause and they will be motivated to resist that also.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 2:37 pm and is filed under No no no!, Privacy.