Schools are holding increasing amounts of
information on children, with some schools even holding fingerprint
data.
Children are just as entitled as adults to
access to their information as protected by the Data Protection
Act, said the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). Schools must
respect requests made by children from 12 years-old and up, and
requests from parents for younger children, it said.
"The Data Protection Act gives us all
important rights to access information held about us," said Phil
Jones, Assistant Commissioner at the ICO. "Schools should treat
students’ requests for their own personal information properly and
requests for a student’s educational record must be processed
within 15 days."
"As a general rule, students aged 12 and over
should be considered mature enough to make a request for their own
personal information, but as young people mature at different ages
schools must treat each request on a case by case basis," he
said.
Schools gathering fingerprint data on pupils
now number in their thousands, according to campaigners, and many
do not ask parents' consent before installing the systems. They are
used in libraries and lunch halls to keep track of students'
borrowing and consumption and at doors and gates to allow
entry.
"A pupil, or someone acting on their behalf,
has the right to access their personal information held by the
school," says the ICO's guidance. "This includes information held
on computer (or other automated means); information held in
structured files; information in the educational record regardless
of the form in which it is held, and unstructured information, for
example, held in loose correspondence."
The law does not currently demand that
parental consent is received before fingerprint and iris scan data
is collected, but the ICO and Government are reported to be in
talks on whether or not this should be made to be the case.
The ICO said recently that it was too late to
stop biometric scanning in schools, even if it wanted to. David
Smith, deputy information commissioner, told technology news site
The Register that: "For us to come out now and say fingerprinting
isn't allowed would be very difficult because these systems have
come in over the last four years. We were asked about them and we
said it was okay."
