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

theguardian.com

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

#131

Post by dgroshev »

imnotlost wrote: post #63

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-censorsh…

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.

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

#132

Post by rob137 »

joncrocks wrote: post #126
rob137 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ter…

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.

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

#133

Post by rightbyte »

throwaway71271 wrote: post #22
robertlagrant wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 coul…

The Police is not a paper clip machine. As soon as they consume half of GDP taking more will decrease their funding since they don't produce anything.

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

#134

Post by SoftTalker »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #108
KennyBlanken wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the British. 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…

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 provi…

Or they could just use paper and books and avoid the whole morass.

There is zero need to be using "devices" in schools at least until High School, and I'd question even then.

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

#135

Post by hef19898 »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #103
hef19898 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure any of that is any of a schools business. Not even sure something like that would be legal over here.

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…

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.

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

#136

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

Silhouette wrote: post #114
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

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.

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

#137

Post by RHSeeger »

Ylpertnodi wrote: post #3

"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." ...but not the parents.

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.

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

#138

Post by krisoft »

throwaway71271 wrote: post #22
robertlagrant wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 coul…

> you have to remember that every system in the modern society is trying to be total.

What does “be total” means? I’m not familiar with the phrase.

> The police wants to stop crime, at all cost

Are you joking? Clearly not. There is so many things they could do if they “want to stop crime at all cost”.

> I will leave it to you to think what the ultimate goal of the education system is.

I don’t know what you are insinuating. Could you spell it out please?

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

#139

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

SoftTalker wrote: post #134
fnordpiglet wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 provi…

Or they could just use paper and books and avoid the whole morass. There is zero need to be using "devices" in schools at least until High School, and I'd question even then.

It can work out cheaper to provide digital devices than providing plenty of books and of course they're a lot more flexible.

Modern society is of course dominated by technology, so there's a strong argument for getting all kids to have experience in using it.

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

#140

Post by bowsamic »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #109
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'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?

> How did this sort of thing creep into schools without anyone protesting?

See the discussion in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37594179

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