Parents to get classroom spynet in 2010

Another pilot...

...another surveillance measure to be rolled out across UK. Presumable so police and/or politicians can watch us at work.

Hmmm, two posts in one day and both unusually paranoid. Must be something in the air.

This is news?

We've been working towards this target for almost two years. All secondary schools needed to have a VLE by 2008 and an MLE by 2010.

Most of the London Schools went with Fronter for the 2008 target, as LGfL got us a deal.

The MLE is down to our respective MIS providers. Capita have been developing their portal for quite some time, but as this is Capita, it's both costly, and there are always reliability issues.

Serco on the other hand, have provided this functionality for years (http://www.sercolearningsolutions.com/schools/products/mis.htm), but scrapping one MIS system in favour of another is costly and time consuming (Implementation and training).

As If us School techies didn't have enough to do..................

buh

I think the people who should see their children misbehaving are exactly the same ones who do not care, or think it is funny.

@Kenny

Kenny

If you pansies up in Scotland didn't take TWO whole bank holidays to recover from New Year's Eve, maybe there'd be more money washing around your economy to pay for it.

Seriously, how much stuff does Scotland get that the English don't get? A parliament that is only open to your countrymen, for instance? Pot, kettle, etc...

Andrew

Hmm - not 2.0 enough

Given that the government is insisting on a PC in every home could they not just insist that as part of that deal all the kids must open an arsebook account and invite their teachers to be their bestest friend and allow them to post videos on their pages for viewing by the whole world - add barcodes to their foreheads and when the camera is pointed at them it will automatically send the feed to the right account

Or maybe the teachers could have mobile devices with speech recognition so that child specific comments got tweetied to the relevant twatter immediately - I am sure that Joyce Grenfell would be all for it.

Well - its as good as most of the schemes the Govt comes up with.

Death of childhood part 4536

God I'd hate to be a kid these days. I suppose the next step is the personal webcam over every desk. And we wonder why kids are doing drugs aged 8. Wouldn't you?

*comic book guy voice* oh please take away (more of) my privacy, i do not want it!

Are there really people so insecure they want the government to wrap them up in a blanket so much so they are willing to sacrifice their privacy (and the privacy of everyone else in the country) in order to feel "safe"?

@Greg

Absolute rubbish!

Secondary school teachers have more than enough free time, at maximum they have 25 hours interaction time per week, leaving a MINIMUM of 10 hours (After compulsory tea breaks) for marking, lesson plans, and anything else required of them, not to mention several "Inset" days set aside for training and administration work.

From my own experience working in a school, the teachers would rather spend their 10 hours sitting in the staff room having a chat or browsing the internet than to actually do what is required of them.

What other employment requires absolutely no knowledge of what you are doing, offers13 weeks paid holiday and a £5k starting bonus?

Answer - None (well maybe working for the government).

If teachers were any good at their subject then they would be out in the real world, doing it! Instead they don't know what they are trying to teach, work cushy hours, have 3x as much holiday as everyone else and still want to bitch and moan because telling a group of ASBO-wannabes for 25 hours a week is too much work!

@Vladimir Plouzhnikov

I couldn't agree more. I want my children to learn to stand on their own two feet before they are adults and head of into the big bad world (although I'm sure the People's Republic of NewLab will have it all controlled for them by then).

So given that -

a) I don't want it or need it

b) It is a security/data risk

how do I opt out? I don't want anyone who can guess my mothers maiden name and who know's when my birthday is to be tiptoeing through my children's school records. Not to mention the fun had by the kids hacking each others accounts

"Ha ha, Johnnie has to visit the nurse every thursday to have his piles scraped'

comment 1

"This isn't a substitute for personal contact," Knight said of the raft of technology projects. "It will augment and supplement it." ... Oh Yeh? - I used to work in a school - this will either be unworkable OR it will replace entirely all teacher-pupil contact time (especially PE)

Up North?

Hello Kenny, Yes - I remember Scotland, home of the blueskins, birthplace of the Prime Minister, origins of the Bank of England, nationality of the man who perfected road surfaces, the man who developed the telephone etc etc etc source of all original thought, music, wisdom and intelligence in the entire universe.

Now Shhhhhhh - or we WILL get this stoopid child monitoring carp in our schools too.

Yet another Government IT project

And we all know how those turn out... *sigh*

@ AC @ Greg....

"What other employment requires absolutely no knowledge of what you are doing, offers13 weeks paid holiday and a £5k starting bonus?

Answer - None (well maybe working for the government)."

I think you will find that is entirely wrong, as I work for the government and I know exactly what I am doing, and I don't get 13 weeks paid holiday. And as for a £5k starting bonus? Seriously, what job are you talking about? I'll send my CV into them...

"If teachers were any good at their subject then they would be out in the real world, doing it!"

Really? So then who would be teaching the kids at school how to do any subject? Actual members of a profession? Remember, we no longer live in a society where a child would generally learn a skill or trade from either a parent or other peer. We rely instead on our schooling system to provide those skills necessary for a young adult to survive in the "real world".

I really hope your not falling back onto that old axiom, "Those who cannot do, Teach". Which, in my mind, makes no sense, because if you can't do the thing at hand, how can you teach it?

@AC@Greg

Good but no cigar - you need to work on your digression and lose the rationality - we shouldn't be able to actually work out a logic to the flame on first read.

We need to be abe to visualise the spittle flying from the mouth - mix up the words and lose the spelling - punctuation should either be non existent or all over the place.

Your eye swivelling was far too subtle - more Taylor Pruitt Vince when we need to see Christopher Lloyd - let us see those eyes right out on stalks.

Remember - grammar, logic, punctuation and spelling are your enemy.

And the REAL reason for this initiative

...is social engineering on the part of UK gov to get children used to the idea of being under constant surveillance and to accept this as the norm. In just 20 years' time, there will be a whole generation of adults who simply take massive government intrusion into their lives as a matter of course. Remember kids: Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc!

P.S. Hey El Reg, we need a George Orwell/1984 icon!

Strange comments

Just for the anonymous coward, posting "Absolute rubbish!

Secondary school teachers have more than enough free time, at maximum they have 25 hours interaction time per week, leaving a MINIMUM of 10 hours (After compulsory tea breaks) for marking, lesson plans, and anything else required of them, not to mention several "Inset" days set aside for training and administration work.

From my own experience working in a school, the teachers would rather spend their 10 hours sitting in the staff room having a chat or browsing the internet than to actually do what is required of them.

What other employment requires absolutely no knowledge of what you are doing, offers13 weeks paid holiday and a £5k starting bonus?"

Dunno what planet you've been working on, but I've just finished my marking and preparation for tonight and it is now 2am. Your communts are utter tosh. These 25 hours you mention refers to the teaching time. Am equal amount of time is often spent marking and preparing work. We haven't even got onto effective report writing, dealing with behaviour management, long term planning, curriculum development, dealing with constantly changing exam syllabi and much more. I certainly won't claim that teachers get is harder than many other professionals but your comments about timing are wrong and entirely mistaken. There is also no £5k bonus unfortunately, nor any of the other benefits you suggest. Quite honestly the holidays are extremely good but you have to be a teacher to appreciate the pressures that you are put under. Then you won't moan about the holidays at all.

My concern about this latest government initiaitive is how well it is going to be funded and supported. The current systems used as examples cost schools thousands of pounds. If some whole scale, expensive system is imposed on schools without adequate training, planning and provision it simply won't work as well as it could.

Ideal if it streamlines the reporting processes, allows useful contact between parents and teachers and allows parents to track their own child's progress. However, I really have to be convinced about the practical reality.

@AC 'Absolute Rubbish'

You clearly don't know any Secondary school teachers.

If you did you'd realise that they work most evenings and every weekend during term time to keep *on top* of their workload. Plus, they also work during their 'holidays' to keep up to date with government's latest interference (sorry, policy) and prepare lesson plans, which they don't have time to do in term time.

I'm not a teacher (you couldn't pay me enough!), but I have several friends who are and they absolutely deserve their pay and holidays as any sane human being would not put up with the kids, parents, back-stabbing 'colleagues', government interference that teachers endure routinely.

Teachers need more resources and support from government, not the latest IT disaster... £30m FFS!!!

@Colin Millar

"Given that the government is insisting on a PC in every home could they not just insist that as part of that deal all the kids must open an arsebook account and invite their teachers to be their bestest friend and allow them to post videos on their pages for viewing by the whole world - add barcodes to their foreheads and when the camera is pointed at them it will automatically send the feed to the right account"

I give you e-ilp.

Waste of everyone's time

Why bother with all this nonsense when we've already learned the best way to control children is to feed them narcotics?

Discipline and moral standards are barbaric throwbacks to acting normally. Can't have a kid saying he's "bored" in class and acting up, definitely must be something wrong with him if he doesn't conform to the Hollywood "all kids are angels" norm.

But if we can't stuff them full of drugs, and to me that seems the perfect solution, why waste time on interweb spying when we could simply take direct control of our children via brain implants?

Look we all know that there's no such thing as a bad kid. We know that no action whatsoever should result in punishment. So to preserve the mythical world where these rules apply, simply have the adults direct the kids behaviour via joysticks.

Gives parents something to do during the 2 hours a day they aren't devoting to WoW.

My solution to my kids doing things they probably shouldn't is to stick them in front of a few consoles. No one can rob a store or smoke drugs if their time is sensibly filled playing video games. Sometimes one of them might even teach them something moral. Sort of. Well mostly not, but at least we're giving it a crack.

In the mean time I'll save up for some of those designer mind-altering drugs that fix children, and hope they haven't developed too many chonic back injuries while we wait.

Next year we'll find that physical activity is a barbaric form of torture and no kid should be forced to participate in something that might require a bandaid. The US is already there, so Britain won't be too far behind.

And we're already seeing the successes these sorts of approaches bring. Now we have an entire generation of "give them everything they want, regardless of consequences" brats in the corporate world, look at the crackerjack job they're doing of reigning in excesses and fostering corporate responsibility.

This is still a democracy (for now)

How many of the people complaining here, voted these idiots in again, and again? You get all you deserve!

Strangely enough, I always believed the teacher's job was to

teach!

Does it not strike anyone else as just a trifle odd that our schools are now supposed to act as pseudo jailers for semi feral children that the parents and the police have failed to control! Whilst presumably, the Wizard of Oz hides behind the green curtain and sends his reports back to some curious overlord somewhere in the Westminster swamp.

That the Government wishes to offer more form filling and general time wasting in place of an education for children, which of course would ensure that they are fit and ready to fill the jobs which are already earmarked by the Government for foreigners, on the grounds that we have no persons available or able to fill these posts - none of this should come as any surprise. Small wonder it is that legions of the able are now escaping Britain for other countries, leaving behind the binge drinkers, and those unfortunates who cannot escape, as the blob like entity of the burgeoning public sector swallows them whole with scarcely a hiccup.

Yes, Paranoid Cynic are my middle names.