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

theguardian.com

141–150 of 176 posts

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

#141

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…

I wish people would stop calling any website/networked service an "app". That's just the interface

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kids aren't already there during the summer . As the GP pointed out.

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. So… why delivery and why a list?

Yes, all kids will be able to make it back to the school easily...

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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?

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

#145

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…

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.

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

#146

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…

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

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

#147

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.

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!)

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

#148

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…

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!

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

#149

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)

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

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

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
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