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Row as schools take kids’ prints

Aug 3 2008 by Ruari O Toole, Sunday Sun

THOUSANDS of children in North schools are set to be fingerprinted . . . to speed up library and canteen queues.

The practice, which is on the rise in North Yorkshire and the North East, has already come under fire from parents who think it is intrusive and puts children at risk of identity theft.

A parent of a child at the Hummersknott school in Darlington, which uses the £15,000 fingerprint scanning system, said that parents were only given seven days’ notice.

He added: “The school made no effort to consult parents. In my view there has been a huge, intrusive move into personal liberties.”

In a letter responding to his concerns, headteacher Pat Howarth wrote: “The decision to install the system is simply to alleviate the major problems encountered with the long queues at lunchtime.”

A spokesman from Darlington Borough Council said the data stored was held as a complex series of digits which could not be traced to a child’s identity.

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