Fingerprinting in Schools

Images produced by St John Fisher School in Peterborough, showing their equipment used to take children's fingerprints for "cashless catering".

This is a name-and-shame list of schools that collect fingerprints from children.

Background

Children are not capable of giving informed consent, and being coerced by authority figures into having your fingerprints taken at a young age is deeply unethical, and many former students feel violated.

To make matters worse, there isn't even a remotely sensible explanation for this. Have these schools never heard of key cards? Just because you don't want people handling cash in a school environment does not at all necessitate the disproportionate mass collection of sensitive (and highly-regulated) biometric data.

With limited funding and resources, schools are also known to be poorly-equipped to deal with cybersecurity threats and often exploited by technology vendors with products they don't understand. Your institution may try to reassure you that fingerprints are only used for one specific purpose and never transferred anywhere - can you actually be sure of that?

It is completely the norm for this sort of technology to upload everything to the company's centralised server, often in foreign countries with far weaker data protection laws. Has the school done a proper security audit to make sure their fingerprint scanners aren't streaming children's biometric data over an unencrypted HTTP connection? No. (and they probably think "encryption" is a scary thing that pedophiles use and we need to outlaw)

Be extremely sceptical of any reassurance that these schools might try to give about secure handling of biometric information - in reality, the fingerprints they collect are almost certainly being uploaded to remote servers owned by companies you've never heard of.

Schools

Each link in this section takes you to a source confirming the use of fingerprints.

London

• Capital City Academy, Willesden
• Rooks Heath School, Harrow
• Hornsey School for Girls, Hornsey
• Brentside High School, Ealing
• Buxton School, Leytonstone
• Heron Hall Academy, Enfield

Birmingham

• Hodge Hill College
• Hall Green School

Manchester

• Loreto High School

Liverpool

• The Blue Coat School

Reading

• Kendrick School

Hertfordshire

• Hitchin Girls' School

Kent

• Thamesview School
• Meopham School

Devon

• The King's School
• King Edward VI Community College - article from 2009 describes backlash after planned introduction, unclear whether they still do it.
• Devonport High School for Boys

Cornwall

• Helston Community College
• St Ives School

Suffolk

• St Benedict's Catholic School

Norfolk

• Sheringham Sixth Form
• Hobart High School

Gloucestershire

• Thomas Kemble School

Lancashire

• All Saints' Roman Catholic High School

Essex

• The Gateway Academy
• Standhill Infants' School

Cambridgeshire

• St John Fisher Catholic High School

Swansea

• Olchfa School

Leeds

• Benton Park School
• Bruntcliffe Academy - "Year 7 Biometrics"

Sheffield

• Ecclesfield School (confirmed by student)

Northumberland

• Coquet Community School

North Wales

• Emrys ap Iwan - fingerprints also required for entry/exit of building

See also

• We also maintain a name-and-shame list of Restaurants and Bars that force visitors to have their IDs scanned and uploaded to databases of companies in the surveillance industry.
• "The toxic schooling system" - how schools are promoting cultures of surveillance and authority (Not specifically about British schools, not all points apply)

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Fingerprint scanning is far from the only biometric violation that is becoming commonplace in schools - it's increasingly normalised to install CCTV cameras in the toilets too. Maybe we should start another page for this?