Can we also have a discussion about the 'normal' behaviour monitoring tools like Classcharts that are used by pretty much every school in the UK? These collect fine-grained data about behaviour throughout the day and link it both to the child but also the people that are near that child. It operates all across the child's school career. I've tried to opt my kids out of this but it's really hard. At best I think they have stopped logging their behaviour but they are still in the data as a 'network' influence. Classcharts used to boast about how their AI could do behavioural profiling but that looked too creepy so now they just talk about how teachers can use the data for seating planning. I'm pretty sure that I could use the data to profile a child pretty effectively even after they have left school. God only knows what happens to the data or how it is secured - the school literally don't care and think I'm crazy for even asking.
Just had a watch of their demo video. One of the seating plan sliders allows you to cluster pupils by free school meals (i.e. socioeconomic class) or EAL status. Such wonderful technology!
I'm so glad I don't have children in school in the UK. There seems to be so much going on that has nothing to do with education. I'm glad that when I was at school in the sixties and seventies in the UK none of that existed and teachers pretty much just taught.
How did this sort of thing creep into schools without anyone protesting?
"Staff using the app have told the criminal justice campaign charity Fair Trials that they keep it secret from parents and carers, and admitted many would be concerned about it if they knew of it."
I worry that our school system is now made up of teachers and support staff who are still absurdly undervalued and trying really hard to give our kids a good education but then a whole layer of management above them who have lost the plot.
>How did this sort of thing creep into schools without anyone protesting?
Apathy as others have mentioned. Apathy because people are tired. And maybe apathy because it's clearly being aimed at people for class and/or ethnicity. People tolerate a lot of bad if doesn't affect them in particular.
This is unfair for me to ask, but what are you doing about it? This impacts you, your children and your peers. Identifying and protecting your own is great, but what are you doing to ensure those not as tech savvy and critically minded are ensnared in this?
People need to push back on this sort of thing - if they don't, it just steamrolls forward.
I guess whether it’s fine grained throughout the day depends on the school, in my school they would only really give positive/negative points maybe once a week or less (if that’s what you’re talking about)
Yeah, the one good thought I did have when learning about this tool was "most teachers are not going to have the time to fiddle with this during teaching". But I'm sure there are several companies currently working on a way to do this scoring automatically via commodity webcams facing the class
The title made it sound like the schools were installing malware on students' devices, but as far as I can tell this is just a central database bringing together data from different government agencies.
I'm not sure I see the problem with schools getting an update that a kid was arrested by police or that their family is on food aid or something. Schools in my area need to know which kids are living in poverty because they send home backpacks of food with them over the summer.
> just a central database bringing together data from different government agencies
I realize this is a US perspective, but this actually sets off more alarm bells in my head than a school overreaching by installing spyware. The latter can be addressed by direct parental action pretty easily. Government agencies systematically sharing data is a lot harder to solve and if anything is more dangerous.
Just because a family gets welfare aid from one agency doesn't automatically mean that they want their kid's school to know about it. Maybe they got enough and want their child to not have to feel different from the other kids by getting special treatment at school. Why not just let the family self-report their need to the school?
More alarming is the idea of reporting interactions with police. A conviction is one thing, but an arrest could very easily be a mistake, and propagating that information explicitly in the name of child protection is a recipe for turning that mistake into a tragedy when a school overreacts.
>Staff using the app have told the criminal justice campaign charity Fair Trials that they keep it secret from parents and carers, and admitted many would be concerned about it if they knew of it.
The other red flag is exactly zero examples of how using this data allowed anyone to "safeguard" at-risk youth or to "act quickly" to intervene.
It's profiling, plain and simple. Despite best intentions, it will definitely enable bias (unconscious or not) to be a factor in how children and their families/caregivers are treated.
This is the kind of thing where it might be ask for a panopticon where the parents can see precisely what kind of queries are run on their data, by whom and why, with a time limited ability to keep query data secret for police investigations and such.
Fighting against this type of data sharing on principle will probably fail because there are some legitimate use cases to Keep the Children Safe for this type of data.
It'll be hard, however, to push back a request that all data access requests are logged with justifications because, after all it helps to Keep the Children Safe.
You might also discover that the appetite for this data might wane entirely if they can't access it without being monitored and without having to justify themselves.
I'm curious how well a GDPR challenge would fare. There's specific exemptions around data gathering to detect fraud and to solve crimes, but this database has a lot more detail and the lack of consent from families is concerning.
One of the details mentioned in the article is that the ICO (the UK data protection regulator) has reportedly already given its blessing to what is going on here. That's interesting because it suggests that either the nature of the system and any potential risks it brings are being overstated by its critics or the public service that explicitly exists to regulate such systems isn't effectively limiting the power of the state where it should. Those are very different situations and I don't think there's enough objective information in the article to tell which is happening.
Article 6(1)(e) of the GDPR states that data processing is lawful if it is “necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller.”
I'm sympathetic to this, because my own politics are very libertarian. But recently I've gotten more sensitive to cases where we acknowledge that something is the government's job (e.g. protecting kids from violence), but then we insist that that job should be done poorly. I think this has ripple effects, not only in that the job doesn't get done well, but in the culture of how the government works and who chooses to work in government. It seems like there should be a middle ground where we don't want the government to be responsible for too many things, but we do want it to be good at the things it's responsible for.
>But recently I've gotten more sensitive to cases where we acknowledge that something is the government's job (e.g. protecting kids from violence), but then we insist that that job should be done poorly.
We don't insist they do the job poorly. Instead, we set things up so that they need to cover their own ... asses when they take action. Instead of making a rational decision on a per situation basis, we get things like "0 tolerance" rules; so that the authority figure can say "I was just following the rules". Because if they make a judgement call, SOMEONE will flip out and they'll get fired. And that leads to all kinds of horrible outcomes
- Child brings a plastic knife to school to cut their lunch with, they're suspended because it's a weapon
- Child is attacked by a bully and is suspended, because they were involved in a fight
Adding information gathering systems that will quickly wind up being abused, but have very little possibly positive value... doesn't help with what's currently wrong with the system.
Yep. I wrote a longer comment elsewhere in this thread so I won't repeat myself, but I think people attributing this to just surveillance obsession and nosiness are a little off the mark. If anything I would say the public have to share a fair bit of the blame here - there are constant demands that the public sector Do Something to Protect Our Children from abuse (independent of any statistics on frequency and whether the Something actually reduces it) which leads to an overzealous obsession with Safeguarding, and then teachers are trained to err on the side of oversuspicion, and know they may be raked over the coals if they fail to report when in doubt. So I'm afraid to say this is what a significant amount of the public demanded
Sometimes we don’t use every possible tool for every problem, particularly when the mass externalities may be worse than the individual outcome.
An extreme example is nuclear weapons. You can win any single battle with nuclear weapons. But the world will end. Probably better to slog through trenches, and do the job “poorly”.
Labeling kids based of family situation will indelibly make their situations define them. Many kids living in dysfunction go to school as a refuge from their life. School administrators aren’t social workers, and aren’t in a position to provide psychological and social assistance to kids who need it. A lack of funding for those services doesn’t mean you offload the work to functionaries at the local school. Teachers aren’t trained in these areas either - their forte is education and no matter how much you liked your home room teacher, they weren’t trained in social intervention. But there’s another aspect, around that idea of escape - once you’ve labeled everyone according to their situation, when you walk in the room, you have to assume everyone knows. You can’t let your life at home disappear any more. And not everyone who has access to the information will use it in a caring unbiased way. Many people will see a kid who has various labels of dysfunction associated with them as broken, needing special education, judge outbursts or misbehavior more harshly than an unlabeled kid.
Finally, the entire point outlined in the article was to use information about their situation to flag unknown problems. Just because someone is on social welfare or a family member has a mental health issue, or even a parent is in prison, doesn’t mean they’re being sexually abused or whatever. However by labeling them administrators are explicitly intended to use the label to assume a likelihood of previously unreported abuse.
Many parents are accused falsely of abuse or neglect for normal childhood injuries. They go through the trials of the damned to get their kids back and fend off criminal charges, and criminal charges are indelible on your record and show up in background checks even if you’re found innocent.
So - yes, mass surveillance would likely catch more criminals. But it will also criminalize everyone, and punish many that are innocent. It’s better to disarm and slog through the trenches - and maybe actually fund social workers rather than surveillance startups - than descend into this morass.
"but then we insist that that job should be done poorly."
Where is that being insisted? Also, what is the bar for "poorly"? After all, were talking about the government, which does many things poorly despite massive budgets, extensive power, etc.
But social care agencies have a serious problem. They don't take good care of kids, which leads to them having a very bad reputation, which leads to child abuse (and many other crimes) not getting reported. Why? Simple: kids are treated far worse "in the system" than at home, even in abuse situations.
But if CPS doesn't get kids reported, they don't get money.
They don't want to fix this by taking better care of kids (“generational squeeze” on public finances, as the article puts it), so they must find other solutions. And the solutions they're going with are simple: get everyone to report everything on kids, in a format that can be easily used in court.
In 6 months, expect a message that a teacher got beaten up for, probably unknowingly, causing a kid to be forcibly placed into "care".
Maybe the real problem is that there exists a system design to allow querying a person's family connections to police interactions. This isn't even just convictions, but basically any accusations or investigations. The wording is kind of vague, but I think this framing is supported by the article.
The existence of such a system just seems dystopian.
Seems entirely reasonable that issues of domestic violence should be known to schools, but this goes way beyond that.
It's only a matter of time before more public institutions manufacture reasons to use the same system. Surely the NIH should know about your police interactions before treating you.
Bloody hell - until I looked at the digram, I did no realise - this is pure profiling. What has benefit data got to do with a child at risk. As per Housing - this is profile of people because they live on the 'wrong' estate.
"Accessing Out of Work benefits" is saying the child may be at risk.
"Teenage Parent" is used as an indicator.
Yep. The fact that you can effectively be smeared by a state-managed record with often no right of appeal is disturbing. And this isn't the only scenario. Look up "non-crime hate incidents", which depend largely on a victim's claim that the event took place and that they believe it was "hateful", and I believe can show up on some DBS background checks. Why are the police disclosing these events that are by definition non-crimes?
> For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone [1]
David Cameron was rightly criticized for those comments in 2015. Unfortunately there's been a bit of a culture shift since then, and it's now often those same critics supporting similar measures and implying that you must have something to hide if you fear them
Not all parents will respond, and of those that do, not all parents respond honestly. But the child still needs to be fed, whether the parent thinks they need to be fed or not.
It shouldn't be the responsibility of teachers or the school to provide food, but if there's a real need, then why don't they offer the food to those that want it and just cut out the secret database crap?
Gather together a big pile of food and let the kids know where it is with instructions to only take what they need for the next couple of days or so. Why go to the bother of sending the food out, when the kids are already there. Also, the parents/carers may feel insulted if they are thought to be receiving "charity", so it'd be a better idea to allow the kids to obtain extra food without involving the rest of the family.
In the US there is a summer lunch program at participating schools. And kid any day can come get a free lunch, they just pick it up. Makes sure that kids get food in the summer.
This may shock you, but the teachers aren't the ones delivering the food!
Nevertheless, the organisation of services to provide free food to selected kids at home and at school requires a database to record which kids. Such a database is also accessible to schools for obvious reasons.
If you have the very HN-y opinion that being on a database is so bad it would be better if the kids stayed hungry that's fine, but please at least make a token attempt to understand a system before dismissing it.
> If you have the very HN-y opinion that being on a database is so bad it would be better if the kids stayed hungry that's fine, but please at least make a token attempt to understand a system before dismissing it.
Quite the opposite - my view is that if someone is hungry, then they should be provided food as a basic function of human society. To be honest, I've never heard of this food delivery system from UK schools and I thought that the issue was mainly handled (poorly in my view) by having Food Banks for starving families.
Can you point me to some information on this UK scheme please?
The food delivery system is, frankly a bit of a patchwork rather than a national scheme now: there was a national scheme introduced during the pandemic to supply vouchers to kids that would otherwise have received school meals during school closures, and packed lunches to self isolating kids, a lot of campaigns to extend that to regular school holidays spearheaded by the unlikely figure of a professional footballer, and now a patchwork of schemes run by many local authorities covering everything from community organised lunch clubs to vouchers to packed lunch deliveries
If you want to argue it sounds like a mess and would be better as a broad social security scheme I'm not going to disagree (though limiting numbers on it does save governments money...), but either way, it's going to need names and addresses on a database to make it work.
Not having kids myself, I didn't realise that teachers were so involved in providing food. I'd definitely go along with delegating food provision to a different group other than teachers (dinner ladies?). I suppose my concern is tying together multiple data sources when it should not be necessary to look at police records when deciding to give out food vouchers.
In the UK it's absolutely common for schools to be involved in family welfare simply because the other arms of the state have withered away to uselessness. In theory there's a concept of "Team Around The Child" where the various agencies - school, social services, social housing, sometimes even police - can come together to help the child through the rough circumstances they're in. In practice, the only one of those that isn't entirely dysfunctional is the school, and so you'll often find school headteachers or SENCOs basically acting as the sole champion of a kid from a troubled family.
If that is what it is, more power to teacher caring that much abozt their students. Not sure if covert data collection at scale helps those teachers so.
> Schools in my area need to know which kids are living in poverty because they send home backpacks of food with them over the summer.
This is the sort of thing that sounds good at first but ends up with these big brother databases.
Really, why is it the responsibility of the school to send home food with a child? Schools should teach. That's it. If there is a need to send food to some family, there are agencies and charities that are specifically created and empowered to do that job.
Using schools as conduits for all sorts of unrelated social services is why our schools are so fucked up. Instead of just being focused on teaching, they are now responsible for psychological services, food distribution to the needy, substance abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse intervention, mandatory reporting of any number of other concerns, all of which contributes to the need to monitor everything and centrally catalog and track as much information as you can about kids and their families.
It was one thing when this kind of stuff might be a note in a file folder, but now it's online, probably poorly secured, and will never be deleted.
Man I totally agree with you, but you have to understand how bad meth has made things. The schools used to send home coats and clothing too, but the parents would sell them. In a just world the state would throw those piece of shit parents in rehab and have a wonderful place for the kids to stay until their parents either straightened up or lost custody. But it is what it is and we do what we can.
Lots of people here not really understanding how this works in the UK.
A few times there's been a big media stories in the UK about a child who got badly abused or killed in domestic situations and then afterwards it turns out that various people (social services, teachers, charities etc) had concerns about the child's safety but concerns weren't written down or joined together and so the child could have been saved/rescued but wasn't.
So now in the UK we have a system of 'safeguarding referrals' where if someone has concerns they must make a safeguarding referral to social services but social services are terribly underfunded so the safeguarding referrals tend to pile up or just get filed unless they are really urgent. So now we have the problem of someone somewhere being responsible for wading through all the information and then identifying when the various reports from various places add up to a serious situation.
If you're going to hold government services such as social services or teachers responsible for childrens safety then this sort of thing is needed. And if you think thats not the job of the state then fair enough thats your opinion but in the UK the status quo is that it is the job of the state to look after vulnerable children/people.
I'll just throw in that I volunteer for an organisation that often deals with children, and in many ways safeguarding has been a disaster. I can totally see how good intentions following the 'Baby P'* case led to laws like this. But the reaction from many organisations has been to completely reorient themselves, and at all costs.
This is quite natural given that ultimately the law poses the greatest threat to the leaders of charities, schools etc. You really don't want a high profile failure on your watch.
When I was trained to lead shifts of volunteers, it stood out to me that the only instruction I received was in safeguarding...
My first thought was that something simply isn't quite right, since safeguarding is far newer than the organisation itself.
But actually I think this is just the way of things. If you have enormous punishments, then you will have commensurate reactions from management.
We've lost a large number of volunteers because we can no longer guarantee anonymity to young people. Initially we were reassured that we would only be expected to report things when identifying information was willingly given to us. This has since been revised to instructions that we are to actively seek such information.
The law itself was brought in following high profile instances of horrific abuse that went overlooked by social services. However, the scope of the law is surprisingly wide.
For instance, this would all apply to a 17-year-old who mentions that they were being bullied by peers.
I myself do feel conflicted - abuse is terrible, and it's worth tolerating other kinds of indirect harm to prevent. But it's still shocking to me that the second order consequences don't appear to get discussed at all in the public sphere. I do worry that this has been snuck in as a "Save The Puppies Act" without proper deliberation.
I'm unsure if there are other countries who have pretty much identical laws, or if it is just the UK?
I think the issue is that it's very hard to have open discussions about accepting that certain events are unavoidable and preferable to the second order impacts of trying to 'solve the problem'.
It's hard to talk about at least in part that 'the problem' in these situations tends to be a terrible event that can be avoided, but only avoided by doing lots of lots of 'ever so slightly terrible' things. And so it takes a toll on the soul to look at the balance and say that we should live with 'the problem'.
Yes, this captures my feeling too. It feels like an evil problem. It's not just misaligned incentives, though they do play a role.
I would love to find a name for this type of dynamic. I don't have words for the issue, and feel like I could communicate it more easily to others if I did.
Another example that just sprang to mind. A headteacher I know reported safeguarding concerns when he was made aware that a 7 year old was walking to primary school alone. I suppose partly to do with leaving a paper trail in case the worst should happen - but the system then does kick in all the same. It's the same law that was originally designed to deal with far more serious incidents. (You could argue that this case wouldn't even qualify in many peoples' minds, but it's also not obvious to me that the headteacher was being irrational, given the law.)
If you're going to hold government services such as social services or teachers responsible for childrens safety then this sort of thing is needed. And if you think thats not the job of the state then fair enough thats your opinion but in the UK the status quo is that it is the job of the state to look after vulnerable children/people.
This is the heart of the problem. When you start trying to turn people like teachers and doctors into something other than teachers and doctors you risk breaking the essential trust between parents and the professionals who have a role in their children's lives. That is a dangerous path to follow. Obviously no-one wants to see any child suffering abuse or neglect and obviously as a last resort the authorities might have to intervene to protect a vulnerable child from harm. But there are other dangers with measures like this that are easily overlooked in our culture today and I'm not sure that's healthy.
Unfortunately 13 years of Conservative Party government means that there's no-one left, apart from the teachers, to do the "something other". Phone up your local UK health trust and ask what the waiting time is for a CAMHS referral (Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service). Here's the first one I googled: 30 months. https://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/camhs/oxon/ndc/assessment/
It's easy to blame the incumbent government - and maybe in that respect there is some justification for doing so - but I doubt the deeper issues here are really about party politics. The previous Labour era was also increasingly authoritarian and Starmer, despite his history as a defence lawyer with an interest in human rights cases, has so far shown little willingness to roll back these kinds of measures. I find that remarkable given the number of large and potentially very harmful data breaches there have been this year alone from police services and other government offices including those with responsibilities for sensitive child protection matters but perhaps it is a sign of the times.
I do worry that our society has just resigned itself to the fact that these intrusions will happen and every now and then someone will suffer very badly as a result but "it would never happen to me". I find that ironic when the original subject was child protection where the main concern is situations that are relatively rare but can be very harmful for the child when they do happen.
Certainly experience here in Oxfordshire (my wife has been safeguarding lead at her last two schools) is that the dramatic increase in CAMHS and EHCP referral times is entirely during the Conservatives' spell in power - and the consequent underfunding of local government. It could just be a local issue, and Oxfordshire have certainly been doing badly, but reporting suggests it's widespread. But like you I have no confidence that Starmer will make things better.
I don't doubt you about the situation in Oxfordshire. I suppose I'm suggesting that these measures are symptoms of a wider malaise that has developed in our society over a longer period, where "personal responsibility" are somehow dirty words and everything has to be someone else's fault now.
That leads to unrealistic expectations that the government will somehow solve all problems. That in turn creates a political culture dominated by fear and CYA with an unhealthy side order of paranoia and everything conceivable being monitored/measured.
I don't know for sure what caused this. I suspect a product of several factors including 24/7 news, near-universal access to online systems and particularly social media, and a few high profile events like 9/11 where governments responded very badly and effectively encouraged a culture of fear. It's definitely something about our culture that has changed very clearly within my adult lifetime though. The idea of having principles and understanding why they matter feels very old-fashioned today. And again I don't think that's healthy for our society at all.
So many tragedies happen daily because of human imperfections and limitations. If we develop and put a monitoring collar on the neck of every human being from the day they wre born, we could save so many of them.
edit: I would advocate for a sensible area somewhere between the two ludicrous extremes of 'everyone just look out for themselves' and 'collars that monitor every moment of their lives' based on general consensus arrived at via public discussion and democracy.
> edit: I would advocate for a sensible area somewhere between the two ludicrous extremes
That sensible conclusion is "you can't save everyone". If you try, you inevitably become the tyrant we must be saved from.
To save everyone, you require omniscience and omnipotence. You must know everything about your subjects and have the power to act on that knowledge. There's not a single human on this Earth I would trust with that power.
> in the UK the status quo is that it is the job of the state to look after vulnerable children/people
You literally said it's the state's job to "look after" all those people.
So how far are you willing to go to save them? How much are you willing to sacrifice? Once you inevitably fail because of the limits of the system, will you respect those limits? Or will you sacrifice everyone's freedom and humanity to lift them?
The Think Family Database (TFD) supports and connects safeguarding professionals from Bristol City Council and other public sector organisations.
The data collected by Insight Bristol is securely held in the TFD, and includes information from approximately 50,000 families across Bristol.
The TFD pulls together data from several public sector sources including:
-Bristol City Council (Children Social care, Early Help, Education)
-Avon and Somerset Police
-Department for Education
-Department for Work and Pensions
-South West Commissioning Support Unit (SWCSU)
The data from these organisations displays vulnerabilities or needs. It gives practitioners working with families an understanding of:
-the family's immediate need
-which services the need comes from
The practitioner can contact the relevant service. This helps the practitioner better support the family because:
-the practitioner can discuss the family's immediate issues with the agencies involved
-the family does not have to repeat the same story
This embedded approach helps practitioners coordinate support for families who are most in need. Sometimes those families are obvious but often they are hidden. The TFD highlights the hidden issues.
Using targeted analytics, the system also helps identify children at risk of:
-sexual exploitation
-criminal exploitation
-not being in education, employment, or training
This information supplements the wider council Think Family approach.
These models do not replace professional judgement or decision-making. They guide and supplement the work of professionals and provide information about children at risk that professionals may not easily see. This early identification means that support and interventions can be put in place to stop problems turning into crises.
"The force said “robust privacy and sharing agreements” had been approved by the Information Commissioner’s Office and development of the system done in collaboration with the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation."
There is plenty of information about a child that, if made known to the parents, would wreak havoc on the child's life. For example, through metadata alone, it could be possible to identify that a child has LGBTQA interests/associations/etc. There are plenty of children where the parents knowing this could lead to them being punished harshly, or even on the streets. I don't think automatically sharing everything with parents is the expectation/panacea you seem to imply it would be.
Admittedly, I don't think the schools should have this information either.
> Bristol city council and Avon and Somerset police, who worked together on the system, insist it is in place to protect children, not criminalise them
Of course! When has surveillance been used for anything, but protection?
Predatory teachers may use this to get some background details on their targets or to identify potential targets for grooming. Luckily those kinds of teachers are rare, but not unknown.
Also, some police are known to be racist, so if a certain officer gets it in their head to harass a nationality or ethnic group, then their unsubstantiated accusations would be entered into the database and this could then affect the families' chances of getting a decent education or indeed, the teachers may decide to not enter them into certain exams if they've been prejudiced by the data.
If the safeguarding lead at a school is a predatory teacher looking for grooming targets, the existence of databases is the least of kids' problems. Particularly if the database is mainly flagging up kids that might already be at risk of abuse.
Predatory individuals who are not safeguarding leads benefit much more from people campaigning to silo any records that suggest/confirm they might be a threat.
Unfortunately, child predators are likely to get themselves into as strong a position of trust as possible - coaches, church leaders etc, so I would expect them to attempt to become a safeguarding lead. They could then also use the data to explain why they were taking certain kids into one-on-one sessions.
I do feel like I'm conversing with an LLM that has never attended a school but is tuned to contradict me regardless here!
Senior leaders at schools don't need "data" to justify talking one on one to students or to figure out which students seem vulnerable.
On the other hand, data is useful for people with actual welfare concerns about a child in establishing if there might be some underlying reason behind the child's weird behaviour or expressed fear of going home or visible bruising that's "just an accident". Ensuring nobody can share threats data is a massive net boon to people that harm kids.
> I do feel like I'm conversing with an LLM that has never attended a school but is tuned to contradict me regardless here!
I very much enjoyed my time at an ordinary human child school and attended the mandatory educational lessons very promptly.
There's a balance between using data to identify problems and collecting data which is open to abuse. What concerns me is the apparent indiscriminate use of the data by teachers who are typically not the most privacy focussed people. The predatory teacher example is an outlier, but it demonstrates how there can be unintended consequences. What's more likely is that there will be unconscious bias by the teachers against the disadvantaged children from poorer backgrounds.
To my mind, teachers should only function as a backup social service for those kids that slip through the net (admittedly, not a good net) and should be focussed primarily on education. What set my alarm bells ringing is the lack of openness about the database and whether families can correct false records (assuming they even know that the data exists).
But the "apparent indiscriminate use" is all in your head (I'm glad you have an ordinary human head ;), and if teachers were contacting the safeguarding lead to try to establish who has criminal parents that wouldn't exactly be an unconscious bias anyway! There's plenty of opportunity for actual unconscious bias every time they look at a child or the child opens their mouth...
The database isn't "secret", the groups complaining about it found out because it's described in detail on the local authority website, the fact authorities keep records of stuff like absence from school and social worker contacts is universally known (most of the recent child victim scandals in the UK have been that various people noted of various possible signs of problems at various times but nobody had enough of a joined up view to actually act!) and the only bit teachers are going out of their way to not disclose is "I looked up Jonny's info because I'm not convinced that bruising is accidental".... for obvious reasons
> The database isn't "secret", the groups complaining about it found out because it's described in detail on the local authority website
Well for at least some values of "secret":
> School safeguarding leads told Fair Trials that they kept the system secret from children and their families. One said: “They [parents and carers] wouldn’t know about this ... parents will have no kind of sight of it at all ... They just don’t know of its existence.”
The article is short on details about how access is controlled to the database, so I am assuming (possibly making an ass out of u and ming) that it's poorly controlled. The lack of notification to the families is of concern although there's certainly scenarios where you specifically don't want them to be notified.
My biggest worry is further widening the gap between the rich and the poor and between different ethnic groups. Allowing teachers to have access to police data on the families could be very problematic.
If the children and their families are unaware of the database, then there's a lack of accountability. I also saw no mention of controls in the article, though if there's controls that the families know nothing about, then they would be somewhat moot.
There's no evidence that any teachers can see it. It says safeguarding leads, which don't even have to be teachers. What's left of what you're saying if we remove your assumptions?
Worse yet, most police are at least classist. Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier neighborhoods.
What happens when there's already heavy policing of poorer neighborhoods, and police are trained to "get the bad ones off the streets"? They look for any excuse to arrest and prosecute people in those neighborhoods. Once you have a felony conviction on your record, you're basically unemployable for 10 years (in the US at least). Thus continuing the cycle of poverty. And of course, minorities tend to be disproportionately poor.
This makes that cycle worse. Anyone in the proximity of such a felon due to this data collection and aggregation now becomes a target by the police, raising their chances of getting caught up in the legal system and experiencing life-long consequences because of it.
> Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier neighborhoods.
I see this sentiment often. If this were true it would represent a criminal opportunity to victimize "wealthier neighborhoods." As far as I can tell: that does not seem to be the case very often; and victimization rates are higher in "poor neighborhoods."
I can see the logic of an argument that excessive legal criminalization induces cycles of harmful involvement in law enforcement and legal systems. However, using the language "policed far more heavily" as opposed to "criminalized far more heavily" places the blame on a convenient-to-scapegoat blue-collar occupation rather than directly upon the powerful people who compose the ever-expanding encyclopedia of laws and regulations.
Police already have discretion to enforce the law on whomever, and however they wish. It is inappropriate to try and shift blame entirely to lawmakers, when (obviously) the police have culpability here because of the choices they make regarding the enforcement of those laws. That's why the sentiment is so common. Obviously. Come on.
I still don't get it--not being obtuse, it isn't obvious to me. Is the claim that differences in policing are due to discretion in law enforcement and not because victimization rates are different in neighborhoods of different socio-economic statuses?
Discretion in enforcement is either lawful or not. If discretion is the key problem and lawmakers do not address it, then yes, the responsibility is on lawmakers and ultimately on voters.
Discretion is not the key problem. Discretion is a necessary part of the job.
Let me address victimization rates - because yes, they are higher in poorer communities. That does not justify in any way the behavior of police in those communities, which is to randomly pull over/stop and search/etc. people on the street who "look" like bad guys. If somebody kills someone, sure, arrest them and put them in prison. Most "bad guys" sent to prison are not violent offenders (drugs, theft, homelessness, child support, etc.) with drug possession being a huge chunk of it.
The culture of policing is the key problem, which is created by a confluence of training, recruiting practices, general societal attitudes, and the political leadership of elected officials. It's not one problem, as you can see - it's many contributing factors.
A local town near me was praised some years back for drastically reducing violence by shifting towards community-based outreach policing. The local news actually called out Chicago for not following its example, you should definitely read about it:
Critics of community oriented policing typically view it as "being soft on crime" instead of a systems problem. The "put bad guys in prison" model has the effect of continuing the cycle of poverty, and measures such as mostly doing away with pre-trial detention (i.e. bond) for non-violent offenders are intended as a systemic fix for the poverty cycle.
Wait, it sounds like you are shifting the goalposts. In the item "37598636" [0] at issue is Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier neighborhoods. but here at 37605421 [1] the issue is how not how much policing is performed. Maybe the claim is better stated as "poor neighborhoods poorly policed stay poor."
Additionally, the americanactionforum.org link does not support the claim "Most "bad guys" sent to prison are not violent offenders (drugs, theft, homelessness, child support, etc.) with drug possession being a huge chunk of it."
The link is somewhat inconsistent. It claims "The United States currently incarcerates 2.2 million people, nearly half of whom are non-violent drug offenders" and "Of the 2.2 million currently being held in the U.S. criminal justice system, nearly 500,000 people are being held for drug offenses." .5M is about a quarter of 2.2M.
Looking at one of the cited sources [2, Table 13], the latest data is 2019 and states that a slim majority of prisoners are in prison for violent crime. Given that the ojp.gov survey does not include pre-trial jail, maybe % nonviolent drug offenders is different from the below data, but my null hypothesis is that the proportions would remain largely similar.
Violent: 55.5%
Property: 16.0%
Drug: 14.1%
Public Order: 12.3%
When you give someone a power, always consider that it will basically always be used in the worst imaginable way. Regardless of any and all lip service to the contrary.
Yes, consider the power itself, not the category the power belongs to. If a school knows 2 extra things about you (on benefits; father in jail for child abuse), that's not the same as 24x7 video surveillance. Risk assess the reality, not the overarching category.
Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used. The problems captured by the Kafka metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition or chilling. Instead, they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but they also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.
Why dont we just take all the children? Let the state raise them. Father was in jail, he should never see his children ever again. Mother was drunk, take the kids and lets sterlize the parents just in case.
I am making an extreme argument, there is obviously a line for CPS, but you have to remember that every system in the modern society is trying to be total. The police wants to stop crime, at all cost, if they could put is all in matrix like cells so we cant move they would. I will leave it to you to think what the ultimate goal of the education system is.
The only thing that stops systems from becoming total is our votes and also the fact that they are somewhat adversarial to each other e.g. if one becomes more total it consumes from the other system's power and so each systems fight for its life and multi dimensional predator/pray equilibrium is formed.
> you have to remember that every system in the modern society is trying to be total
No, it's not. A school wanting to know a few things about a child is not "trying to be total". I get the extreme view; it can be warranted, but again, the worst case is not the average case, and we should just analyse the current case on its own merits.
For example, if you allow ordinary people to operate heavy automobiles, somebody is going to use one to intentionally kill somebody else. Did you think about that before you unleashed millions of these killing machines?
I'm not excited about developments in Bristol, but introducing extreme paranoia isn't helpful. Just a low level of healthy paranoia is good enough.
If a school knows that a child must be kept away from their abusive mother, for example, that is what is being lumped in with "surveillance" here. I'm saying the worst cases of surveillance are not appropriate to judge what the school is doing. We should judge what the school is doing on its own merits/demerits.
The Brits have gone all in on the surveillance society with their CCTV cameras all over the place and now the Online Safety Bill. Still early days, I'm sure it'll be expanded at every opportunity. Maybe 1984 is the blueprint.
In the US the fundamental Christians are grabbing power and they're taking flamethrowers to books and talking about tracking women who may go across state-lines to get an abortion. Self-censorship for fear of being 'canceled' is putting a damper on the spirit of freedom. It's perhaps more along the lines of Fahrenheit 451.
Well, as a Brit, I agree with the surveillance society bit although the police don't even have time to go after the crims, so I suspect that most surveillance footage is ignored unless you're a political figure.
As a devout atheist, I have a particular view of Christians and from what I can gather, the Christo-fascists in the U.S. trying to grab power are Christian in name only and represent almost the exact opposite of the teachings of Jesus. I think it's more of a fascist movement that picks on the most gullible and easily led of groups for their support base.
For decades in the US, school administrators have been obsessed with monitoring student's online activity and email. There is a lucrative industry providing what amounts to glue and regexs for detecting and reporting suicidal language, threats of violence, and so on (you can be sure there's detection of LGBTQ language for all the various religious schools.)
There is a subreddit for K-12 IT administrators and the stuff people would post there about monitoring students was pretty shocking (also, the levels of incompetence are also pretty shocking. Most of the crowd are barely competent at IT basics. People who are in charge of IT at multiple campuses.)
Tell your kids that any email account associated with the school, and anything they even type into a school device (phone, tablet, laptop, computer) is monitored, and even the most innocent keyword could flag their email and put it front of admins. If they want to talk to a trusted friend about anything regarding the administrator or teachers, or something regarding mental health, sexuality, bullying, violence, etc - they need to do it on devices not associated with the school, with no school management software installed, on non-school accounts.
In fact, they should probably never use their school accounts or devices for anything except strictly school related communication and work.
It's amazing how completely ignorant these admins are that, say, hauling a suicidal student into a meeting with administrators is just about the last fucking thing that kid needs, and yet that's exactly what was described in some posts and discussions. The only thing they care about is snooping in student's activity and covering the school's ass.
Sadly a lot of kids only have one portal to the internet and that’s through a school device.
Otherwise the advice should be, as you said, to never use a school device for anything not explicitly required by the school. But when there’s no other route, surveilled access is better than none, I guess?
It’s a tough quandary though - schools can be held liable, at least socially so if not legally, if kids use school provided devices for all the things kids use devices for that they shouldn’t. Meeting sexual predators, bullying, etc. Many parents are technically incapable of monitoring their online activity, others too busy. Schools are being put in a weird spot of being access providers to an adult world online, not just educators.
I’ll wager a lot of school surveillance started with parents demanding it.
It’s a tough subject, I don’t have the answer. My intuition tells me schools shouldn’t be involved in access OR monitoring, but I also understand the “digital divide” isn’t just a media term. A lot of pretty smart kids live in a pretty neglected context, and without access to sources of fact like Wikipedia or sources of dubious plagiarism like ChatGPT (tongue in cheek), they’re at a structural disadvantage that can’t be overcome through hard work alone.
Except they can’t control the fact that wealthier kids will have access to devices that give them Wikipedia and ChatGPT and other online knowledge sources. Being able to tell ChatGPT “explain to me the Byzantine empires history” then interrogate it on fine points to prep to write an essay in immeasurably more powerful than “here’s a middle school textbook good luck understanding the nuances.” This puts the kids without a device at a structural disadvantage, a more steep disadvantage than they’re already at in society.
Finally, there’s an idea of digital literacy - the ability to use these tools to your advantage, and to navigate with sophistication the mental crack of algorithmic personalization. They will have a device at some point, and being taught at a younger age to be skeptical of mental crack might help weaken its hold (still to be seen!)
Wealthier kids have always had and always will have advantages like that. Wealthier kids probably also have their own room and a quiet organized place to do homework. They've probably been encouraged to read and been provided with books and other enrichment opportunities. I think most teachers know who these kids are and and know if they are turning in their own work or not.
I’m not talking about ChatGPT writing an essay for you. ChatGPT is also a pretty good teacher in itself, and can help you learn many topics and subjects by providing direct access to a tutor on most topics. Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia available, more or less.
While schools can’t give you a good family or a nice house to study in, they certainly can give you an iPad.
I can't speak for your area of the world, but every even vaguely metro or suburban area of Australia has public libraries with quiet spaces to work/study, free internet and free computers to use if you don't BYO. Most run digital literacy classes, and a number are even starting to do little cost-price cafe setups.
Whilst being wealthy is an advantage, it's certainly not the gap it once was.
The CCTV meme is completely disconnected from reality. There are plenty of CCTV cameras around, but they aren't connected in any way, most of them are private, and in reality the police mostly can't be bothered to try and access the recordings. American obsession with Ring-like cloud connected cameras and their dealings with police forces are way more dystopian than the reality of CCTV as practiced in Britain.
A good example is my partner getting pickpocketed on an empty tube train, which surely should make finding the person easy, right? Nope, the Met told me they'd need to go and pay the train maintenance company to retrieve the recordings from each carriage on the train, and they're not going to do that over a wallet.
In practice it works pretty well, because it implicitly sets a very high bar on the severity of the crime that would warrant retrieving dozens of recordings and tracing people through them. Skripal poisoning or murders get that treatment and are solved pretty quickly. Small scale crime (or whatever dystopian thought crime scenarios people imagine) doesn't.
> and in reality the police mostly can't be bothered to try and access the recordings
obviously this is the case if you are a normal citizen. imagine how fast they'd access the recordings if a police officer was hurt, or to identify protesters, etc
There are probably hundreds to thousands of protesters protesting for different causes in London alone every weekend. CCTV tracking of protesters is just not happening, it's absolutely unrealistic. Besides, you don't need street CCTV for that, local police van-based CCTV on mass gatherings is already a thing all over the globe.
Stuff like Ring (centralised, pervasive, and already cooperating with authorities) is way more sus than CCTV on British streets.
While I agree that our politicians are obsessed with sticking their nose in people's private business (and the shadow cabinet often merely object that the proposals don't go far enough!), but I would say this is mostly down to a different issue - an overzealous obsession with "safeguarding" and the belief that it must be possible to preemptively block all societal harms, and that those objecting to the cost of the attempts must just be running apologetics.
I have friends and family who work in education and other social care roles, so hear about the various training and policy they're given, and it almost feels like the public sector is putting parents on perpetual trial. And there's the underlying assumption of "if in doubt, raise it", with the false belief that a false report is harmless and will surely come out in the wash with no harm from the process.
Though it's important to remember this isn't down to the staff all being little Umbridges wanting to cause stress; as usual it's down to incentives. They are explicitly told they could be at fault for failing to report a Potential Safeguarding Issue, so it's the safer option in doubt. And at an organisational level, any instance where a child does come to harm leads to potentially nationwide accusations of negligence (sometimes fair) and demands to Do Something, no matter what that something is, what its collateral costs are, and if it even works in the first place.
And of course it would be unfair not to mention that the teachers themselves are often very much victims of similar overscrutiny, and are quite used to self-policing their behavior, with fear of both policy violations and parents' ire. Again, I'm largely criticizing the policy not the people. The common sense and discretion of workers on the ground is often a good defense against stupid policy, but not when there's a credible fear of being disciplined for that
> Self-censorship for fear of being 'canceled' is putting a damper on the spirit of freedom.
I'm always curious about what people mean by this, because usually its people upset they can't say the N-word or upset they're getting cancelled over being sex pests.
I have a friend who has been the safeguarding lead in a school, it's a tough and emotional job with enormous responsibility. He's found it incredibly fulfilling, but I can only imagine what he has had to deal with based on the few hits we have heard.
My understanding is that the teachers that take on these roles are incredibly well trained, understand the responsibility, and know how to be both discreet and keep things privet. I believe a lot of the information available through this app was already being made available to the safeguarding leads in schools.
Challenging the use of this app is good, that's the role of these origination, checks and balances and all that. We need to be sure it is a net benefit for all involved. There is no denying though that if it helps teachers in safeguarding children that is a good thing.
>There is no denying though that if it helps teachers in safeguarding children that is a good thing.
The problem is the variability of quality of teachers. I seen and been involved, both as a parent and governor with Safeguarding leads. There has been wonderful, caring and talented teachers. I am not convinced the excellent teachers need more data - they know the kids and the families very well and can draw on years of experience and support.
There has been also teachers, which have out-dated views and prejudices. This tool in the wrong hand makes matters far worse. This feels like a tool put together with people with outdated views. Like teenage parents are an indicator of a need for safe-guarding or being out of work is a correlation for safe-guiding. This clear prejudices being born-out.
It's the UK term for the person in any organisation that deals with vulnerable people (children, patients, disabled people, old people) that has the responsibility of taking any allegations, concerns, accusations and making sure they are dealt with properly. That means documenting, investigating, and escalating to the authorities.
Maybe a guidance counselor or pastoral role? Who do the police call when they find a student misbehaving, who calls the parents when the kid is repeatedly absent, who talks to CPS if the kid is avoiding going home.
This may come as a surprise to you, but schools, community football clubs, nursing homes etc don't have full time lawyers in the UK. Someone has to decide when to call the police, when to call social services, when to [not] immediately alert parents, guardians of next or kin, when to seek further legal advice etc. And frankly the last person you'd want to be the main point of contact for vulnerable people dealing with sensitive issues is a lawyer whose job it is to minimise problems for the organisation (or maximise work for themselves...)
I guess main the problem is the secrecy. Even the article is unable to say exactly what information the app has, and who has access to it—they mention safeguarding leads being the users, but then talk about how "schools" get notified when a student has an encounter with the police. Does this information get sent only to qualified professionals with clear accountability, or does it get sent to a shared email address that the administrators' receptionist reads?
The secretive approach to this is unsettling, because it implies they know they're doing something they'd get in trouble for. It sounds like the administration's response was "well, this app was public, parents could have read up on it if they wanted", which resembles the old better to ask forgiveness than permission tactic. Clearly, every part of this plan should have been proactively explained to parents beforehand.
As I said in the comment you replied to, it should have been proactive. What I see here is that there exists a single page of text somewhere on a government website, waiting for parents to find it if they search around. I didn't see anything in that article about parents being informed the school was even using the app, let alone given a chance to ask questions or, you know, consent.
Secrecy is an integral part of the effectiveness of the system. If you know how the algorithm works, you can find ways to game it. That doesn't make the practice acceptable, but I think it explains the approach.
FWIW, the same secretive approach prevents anyone from knowing why their social media accounts were banned, or how changes to a website will affect their ranking in the search engines. Exposing the underlying algorithms creates an arms race that will lead to even bigger problems.
Hmm, but you can deploy essentially infinite resources for free in arbitrage to exploiting an algorithmic quirk in social media distribution, search engine rankings, etc.
What exactly is the comparable threat model here? It's ridiculous. What are they exploiting, trace amounts of government resources? For one family?
They're not keeping it secret. It's the same sort of thing as all the EULAs/T&Cs we have to click agree to: much too boring to pay attention to, unless it's a headline.
That said:
> How long we will keep your personal information?
> We will hold this information for as long as it is needed, or if we are required to do so by law. In practice this means that your personal information may be retained for the relevant period listed below:
Just putting an information page up on the council's website isn't very useful unless the children and families know about the system and know to go looking for it. "The plans were on display..." etc.
From TFA:
> School safeguarding leads told Fair Trials that they kept the system secret from children and their families. One said: “They [parents and carers] wouldn’t know about this ... parents will have no kind of sight of it at all ... They just don’t know of its existence.”
You need to read up on your torts. Injury or harm done to a young person can result in a claim for compensation later in life. That's why paediatric insurance is so complicated.
"We will keep a record of who you and your family hung out with and what your financial situation was when you were 15 years old, until you are 90, just in case you (or presumably your great-grandchildren) want to sue the estate of someone that statistically will have pre-deceased you by 34 years"?
It may be how UK tort law works, making it legally justifiable (or even legally mandatory), but the duration is still definitely stupid and wrong.
Well, "stupid and wrong" unless this is one of those things where you need to be a lawyer in the first place to understand all the moving parts that make no sense otherwise; but that's how bad it looks from here.
We use a product called Linewize in my district for around 2500 students. To be honest its reporting is creepy to the degree it analyzes and tries to assign labels to student activity. Hate Speech, aggression, depression, suicide, criminality, gangs, sexual conduct, etc.
I think we as a society need to decide are we just biological automatons that can be controlled via inputs and outputs? Or do we believe in some form of free will and with that some personal privacy.
> Schools using the TFE app receive alerts about children’s and family members’ contact with police, antisocial behaviour and domestic violence incidents. The system also gives schools access to sensitive personal details about families’ financial situations.
Financial situations? That sounds like they're monitoring what's easy to monitor, even if defending against domestic violence was the original intention.
That said, "we joined up thinking" is definitely a valid argument for much of what the UK is doing right now.
For those not following UK news: a large number of schools had to be closed this month due to people finally started paying attention to the fact that reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete lasted 30 years but had been installed 50 years ago.
Monitoring that would have been sensible… but they'd have needed joined-up thinking to have noticed the problem had started happening in the 90s. (Thus making it one of the few cases where one can legitimately also spread blame to the previous Labour government even though the Conservatives have been in power for the last 13 years).
the article constantly mentions racism and i don't understand how racism fits into this picture
i think when they write things like that it means "we don't mean to expose the racist behavior of certain black students when we spy on them through apps we force them to install", which is pretty crooked all around
> the article constantly mentions racism and i don't understand how racism fits into this picture
Some police are known to be racist, so if a certain officer gets it in their head to harass a nationality or ethnic group, then their unsubstantiated accusations would be entered into the database and this could then affect the families' chances of getting a decent education or indeed, the teachers may decide to not enter them into certain exams if they've been prejudiced by the data.
I noticed that too and was wondering about it, then I saw this quote:
Critics say the reality is that this risks children from minority ethnic or poorer backgrounds being profiled as being involved in gangs or county lines operations.
I feel like the correct answer is proper oversight of how the system is used, not a blanket shutdown in case it's misused. Perhaps these charities who complaining should be involved in that?
The goal of the service seems sensible, especially when you consider how often public services have made serious mistakes due to "information silos".
Sounds a lot like the systems some police departments are using to profile people who might commit crimes before they actually happen. Voyager, or something like that?
We call it "right to privacy". But what if we call it "right to hide" or "right to lie" or "right to censor"? That certainly puts a different light on it.
Universal 24-7 communication about absolutely everything would be a very very good thing. Take our whole society up a level.
Except that we have these big predators lurking about.
So the problem isn't the privacy, it's the predators. Right?
Personal identifying information does not belong to any company that gathers or purchases it unless they have specific permission (i.e. not some dark pattern "click here to disable the non-collection of your data") from the person and it is reasonable for them to have that data for their stated purpose. (Somewhat paraphrased from GDPR). The company and or government department need to have a strong reason to be manipulating the family's data and the family should have the right to see the data that is being held on them and also correct or delete it if it is incorrect.
