Author: Emmeline Taylor
ISBN No: 9781137308856
Review date: 11/08/2026
No of pages: 140
Publisher: Palgrave
Publisher URL:
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/Surveillance-Schools/?K=9781137308856
Year of publication: 13/03/2015
Brief:
Surveillance Schools: Security, Discipline and Control in Contemporary Education by Emmeline Taylor
price
£39
Surveillance Schools is a book to challenge not only the users of CCTV, but parents, let alone teachers, writes Mark Rowe.
Emmeline Taylor begins Surveillance Schools: Security, Discipline and Control in Contemporary Education by recalling how her younger sister gave her the idea for her research. Her sister, then 11, had CCTV in her suburban school; โcameras in the classrooms, corridors and the pupilsโ toiletsโ; coverage as good as any downtown system. Taylor looks at the effects of CCTV in schools, turning them, she argues, into โSurveillance Schoolsโ, where CCTV – and fingerprinting and searches – have become routine. Taylor stresses how such surveillance has come in quickly, and without debate – thanks to โblind faith in technologyโ, our old friend โzero toleranceโ and a general mistrust of youth, and preference for the docile and compliant.
Quite apart from the cost of electronic surveillance kit, what of the cost to children – growing up – and indeed teachers? Taylor argues that โSurveillance Schoolsโ are not necessarily safer or better or (the point of schools, letโs remember!?) conducive to learning. Such surveillance can undermine privacy; kill creativity – are children allowed to fool around any more? – โand in the most extreme cases facilitate a direct and expedited channel from school to prisonโ.
On the narrow point of whether schools can offer more personal safety from violence, and secure everyone from such crime as theft and the rare but extreme knife and gun deaths, Taylor points to evidence that CCTV in fact has the opposite effect – teachers give up responsibility for intervening in incidents, because they can pass responsibility to the CCTV. As Taylor puts it – and itโs true elsewhere, and applies to any shiny boxes, not only CCTV cameras – by fitting CCTV, those in authority are doing something about security, which is not the same as making a place secure. And just as CCTV does not deter violent crime on streets, so Taylor found that CCTV did not deter intruders (typically old boys, perhaps in gangs) who for example wore hooded tops to avoid identification. Itโs telling that the pupils (like shoppers in store?) much prefer a member of staff around, rather than the camera on the wall, which will never intervene in a fight. As Taylor found, the CCTV is not used against crime – the teachers are tellingly vague as to whether it is – but to monitor discipline, which is not the same thing. In any case, again as with CCTV generally, outside school, cameras may merely displace crime and misbehaviour (in a schoolโs case, smoking, and truancy). Taylor found – again with a parallel in retail use of CCTV – cameras are in place in case of ligitation; to protect teachers from pupil allegations. Interestingly, pupils are already developing โtactics of resistanceโ to the visual surveillance, for instance by putting up their hood, or tilting a camera to the ceiling. One school has gone so far to seek to counter that by colour-coding ties, to identify at least every pupil by their year group!? As Taylor said, this was more done out of childish play than malice – with the implication, are we right to expect children to behave like adults, under CCTV?
This all brings us to the general dilemma for society with CCTV – does society want CCTV to work, and pay the price in liberty; or does it really want the cameras taken down?
Regardless of whether the CCTV actually works, or is value for money – though both are pressing questions – Taylor is right to describe all this as a โrevolutionary change in educational practiceโ. Sheโs not the first to plough this field – as she acknowledges, the privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch brought out a report in 2012. Sensibly she has studied various schools to show that use of CCTV can differ widely – depending on who can access footage (any teacher? only seniors? what does that say about trust in staff?) and building design (new, or old and red-brick).
She perhaps dives into Foucault and other theorists more than is called for but is barking up the right tree when she brings in the famous โPanopticonโ, the model prison as hailed by the thinker Jeremy Bentham. While itโs off the point of Taylorโs work, admittedly, and she does end by stressing how โSurveillance Schoolsโ are in their infancy and will develop, itโs intriguing to think of the prospect of children who have gone through โSurveillance Schoolsโ and indeed surveillance campuses – 15 years or more of being under CCTV. But is that any different from a corporate workplace? Again, in fairness, Taylor does point to the corporatisation of schools (though she does not succeed in presenting surveillance as part of a more general privatising of UK schools); and schools โas microcosms of societyโ.
School is where children learn in so many ways, and it seems that now that learning includes life under CCTV. Taylor has raised an important issue that matters ultimately to all of us; everyone that has an interest in what sort of society we are creating.
Taylorโs book is quite short and – this is no criticism – I was left wanting more; and many questions – again no criticism, but a sign of how the topic affects every family. What do teachers (are they under surveillance as much as their pupils – more so, as their jobs might be at stake?!) and head teachers think of CCTV? The teaching unions? Parents? Given the explosion in social media, unmonitored, and the prospect of wearable technology (by teachers and pupils?), is in-school CCTV actually quite old-fashioned and not such a big deal to the very youngest generations? If not, should it be?
And is the installing and use (not the same things, just as speed cameras on road are there to deter but maybe never used) of CCTV in schools a sign of the repressive strength of the state, or weakness by those in authority in a school, feeling stretched and short-staffed. Or both a sign of strength and weakness? Because if – as Taylor reports – some misbehaving youths come to realise that they are probably not picked up on CCTV, or at least not told so, doesnโt that undermine the surveillance? In other words, the ones that conform would do anyway, and the loud and unruly carry on regardless?!
