Surveillance

1. A critique of the review into Home Education carried out in 2009 (under the last Labour government).

This review, by a leading social worker with a background in local authority education, inevitably found that more regulation and monitoring of the as yet relatively unmolested home education sector was needed. Not unusually for the time a few extreme cases of child abuse were used to justify the proposed new powers, whose primary manifestation was to extend a blanket of surveillance over everyone rather than limit the interventions of the authorities to cases where abuse was actually a problem. A new layer of legislation was proposed which would have created the “tools” for this blanket surveillance of the sector. However, the proposed legislation did not make into onto the statute book before the 2010 election and has not been taken up by the new administration.

Original publication date June 2009

Badman Review into Home Education (PDF)

2. Biometric Surveillance in Schools

This paper details the extent of biometric surveillance technology in schools as the state was in 2009. Finger-printing devices for library systems, dinner queues and registration are wide-spread. The (now defunct) quango BECTA (concerned to promote technology in education) chillingly welcomed all this as being more ”efficient”.

Original Publication date: March 2009

Biometric Surveillance in Schools (PDF)