SURVEILLANCE cameras were secretly installed in a Scottish secondary school without teachers being told, it has emerged.
A teaching conference heard the cameras were placed in a resource centre regularly used as a classroom, as well as corridors.
The cameras were discovered when a teacher at the unnamed North Lanarkshire secondary overheard the deputy headteacher saying the cameras had caught a pupil vandalising a computer in the resource room.
Stuart Allison, the district secretary of the North Lanarkshire branch of the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association (SSTA), said the union had contacted the council to complain about the issue, but were told they knew nothing about the cameras.
He told the union's annual congress in Crieff: "There had been no consultation with staff regarding the intention to install cameras and no explanation as to why the school was pursuing this course of action.
"There was no signage present to inform staff and pupils that recording was taking place and no clear policy was available covering the legal ramifications of installing cameras inside schools."
Allison said it was later discovered that the monitor for the CCTV cameras was located in the janitor's room, where he could observe images from the cameras.
He added: "The SSTA rep raised these questions with the headteacher indicating that there were rules and regulations in relation to installing cameras which had clearly not been followed.
"Following discussions with him he distributed a short memo to staff informing them that the cameras were present with a very brief rationale to explain why, but to this date there is still no signage.
"It would appear that the images are being used to catch pupils who are up to no good in various places around the school, but using the data in this way is an infringement of the pupils' rights because pupils don't know they are being filmed."
Members of the SSTA backed a motion from the North Lanarkshire branch calling for safeguards.
The motion states: "The association accepts that surveillance CCTV improves the safety and security of the school building. The use of it, however, throws up other issues pertaining to the use of surveillance CCTV within the classroom.
“The association calls on all local authorities to ensure that such technologies are not to be used to gather data for performance management purposes or capability procedures.”
CCTV IN SCHOOLS; THE FACTS
While surveillance cameras are routinely used to monitor public areas, corridors or school grounds there is growing concern from teachers about their use in the classroom.
In particular staff don’t want to see footage from cameras being used to judge the performance of school staff during lessons.
In 2012 it emerged that more than 200 schools across Britain were using CCTV cameras in pupils’ toilets or changing rooms.
Anti-surveillance campaigners who collated the figures warned the research raised serious questions about the privacy of schoolchildren.
Responses from 2,107 secondary schools showed there were a total of 47,806 cameras overall, including 26,887 inside school buildings - a camera for every 38 children. In all, 90 per cent of schools had CCTV cameras, with an average of 24 cameras in each.
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