Via Archrights: first it was the co-option of teachers into fingerprinting every British child, whether they or their parents agreed or not.
Now even the school uniform suppliers are to be drafted into the suburban stasi:.
The chip connects with teachers’ computers to show a photograph of the pupil, data about academic performance and whether he or she is in the correct classroom. It can also restrict access to areas of the school. The radio frequency identification system is being tested at Hungerhill School in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Ten pupils began wearing a chip sewn into their uniforms eight months ago.
The scheme has drawn criticism from human rights campaigners. “Tagging is what we do to criminals we let out of prison early,” said David Cleater, from Leave Them Kids Alone, which campaigns against the finger-printing of pupils. “It is appalling.”
It is, but that’s just a science experiment, Chipped uniforms are on the horizon though and a line of chipped uniform items is apparently going into production, made by Trutex. (Anyone British who has children or who has been a child knows Trutex. They’re one of the biggest suppliers of school uniforms and clothing in the country.)
A school uniform maker said yesterday it was “seriously considering” adding tracking devices to its clothes after a survey found many parents would be interested in knowing where their offspring were.
Trutex would not say whether it was studying a spy in the waistband or a bug in the blazer but admitted teenagers were less keen than younger children on the “big brother” idea.
What, you mean they get a choice?
Nope, didn’t think so.
Even leaving aside privacy concerns this will no doubt add to the cost. It cost over 600 pounds to kit my younger son out when he went to senior school, (and that as ten years ago) because you have to buy specific items in specific colours and patterns by specific manufacturers in specific shops: but if he’d turned up at school in the wrong thing, he’d’ve been a laughing stock, as my sister and I were when we had the wrong brand and colour of games skirts. Thirty years and it still rankles.
That kind of snobbery and financial bullying can drive some children, and some parents, to despair and self-harm. That’s bad enough. How much more is obliging parents and children to pay to be spied on going to cost?
