‘Fingerprinting is turning schools into Big Brother’

Niall Murray, Education Correspondent

Michael Moynihan, chairman of the Oireachtas Education Committee, said fingerprint technology being used in a top Dublin school to combat truancy is an excessive encroachment on children’s lives.

“It sounds more like a scene from George Orwell’s novel 1984 than a contemporary snapshot of school life in Ireland,” he said.

St Andrew’s College in Booterstown, whose 1,200 students pay annual tuition fees of more than 4,000, has begun trials of the TruancyGuard system with a second year class. Students clock in each morning by pressing their fingerprint and an access code into a computer.

While electronic swipe cards and other technologies have been used by schools for roll-keeping up to now, this is believed to be the first system to use biometric information from students.

“I think using biometric technology to detect absenteeism in schools is over the top. It encroaches on civil liberties at a time in people’s lives when they should be afforded more freedom and less Big Brother-type monitoring,” Mr Moynihan said.

The school has installed the system on a trial basis as it attempts to save on the time and paperwork involved in monitoring attendance. The country’s 4,000 primary and second level schools must submit regular attendance records to the National Educational

Welfare Board under recent legislation.

The Dublin company which devised the TruancyGuard system rejected Mr Moynihan’s assertions of Orwellian technology being used.

“With a swipe card, anybody can clock in for another student, but it would be a bit extreme to cut off your finger to skip school. The fingerprints are discarded after the pupil registers on the system and a coded formula to match points from the print is all that is stored, so there’s no question of privacy being breached,” said John Beckett, managing director of Adrenalin Internet Systems.

St Andrew’s College principal Arthur Godsil said it is time-consuming for teachers to register all pupils every morning.

From September, it is planned that parents will be notified by either phone call, text message or email if a student does not register at school in the morning.