Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families • Hacker News Board

Re: Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

#121

Post by ndsipa_pomu » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #113

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 school…

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,…

Ah yes, Marcus Rashford.

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.

Re: Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

#122

Post by notahacker » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:32 PM UTC

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #104

notahacker wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 tea…

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

Re: Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

#123

Post by kwhitefoot » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

tempaway22641 wrote: post #86

matheusmoreira wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. How far are you willing to go?

I dont think anyones advocating going that far 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.

Tony Blair proposed psychological analysis of kindergarten children to predict which ones would become criminals. China has a social score system.

Re: Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

#124

Post by ndsipa_pomu » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #119

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tea…

> the apparent indiscriminate use of the data by teachers Where did you get this impression?

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.

Re: Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

#125

Post by RHSeeger » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:39 PM UTC

oconnor663 wrote: post #71

lolinder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fam…

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 t…

>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.

Re: Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

#126

Post by joncrocks » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:40 PM UTC

rob137 wrote: post #76

tempaway22641 wrote: post #60

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/…

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 lea…

I don't think it's 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'.

Re: Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

#127

Post by circuit10 » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:50 PM UTC

limbicsystem wrote: post #88

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…

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)

Re: Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

#128

Post by ndsipa_pomu » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:51 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #122

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tea…

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…

> 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.

Re: Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

#129

Post by SoftTalker » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

merpnderp wrote: post #4

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 becaus…

> 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.

Re: Call to shut down Bristol schools’ use of app to ‘monitor’ pupils and families

#130

Post by ndsipa_pomu » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

kwhitefoot wrote: post #123

tempaway22641 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think anyones advocating going that far 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.

Tony Blair proposed psychological analysis of kindergarten children to predict which ones would become criminals. China has a social score system.

I'm still waiting for him to be tried as a war criminal