FORGET the days of fumbling around for loose change in the queue at the school canteen…
Pupils at one Jersey college will soon only need one thing to pay for their dinner – their face.
Jersey College for Girls ditched cash many moons ago and replaced it with a top-up card system, and is now set to bring a dash of Mission Impossible to the dining-room experience with the introduction of facial-recognition technology.
The school has written to parents asking them, if they wish, to sign a consent form which would allow their child’s face to be used to create a ‘unique digital signature’ to give them access to their pre-paid catering account.
If they decline, their child can continue to use the top-up card.
The school says that the new system will ‘streamline the cafeteria experience, enhance security and expedite payments processes’ for students and staff.
In a letter to parents explaining how the system would work at dinner times, college bursar Julie Forsyth wrote: ‘When your child looks at the camera, the software reads key features (distance between facial features) and compares this against the database of registered users.
‘When it finds a match, it automatically opens your child’s cashless catering account, allowing the operator to complete the sale of their school meals.
‘We have been assured of the accuracy and that the software works accurately, even with identical twins. However, we will closely monitor this.’
The school says that the consent provided by parents would remain valid for the duration of their child’s education at JCG, unless they chose to withdraw permission.
In the letter, Ms Forsyth says that the system, run by cashless-catering provider CRB Cunningham and due to launch in the new school year, is safe and GDPR-secure and has been used by a large number of schools in the UK.
The things you don’t see in school anymore…
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A teacher scraping chalk over a very worn blackboard was once a common sight. They have now been replaced by white boards, and even smart boards. But this bit of kit has left teachers without that vital weapon for bringing the mouthy kid at the back into line – the chalk rubber.
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A library full of Encyclopaedia Britannicas. Now, very sadly, replaced by the internet.
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Globes. Something else replaced by the internet.
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Pull-down maps. Yep, the internet again.
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TV cart – a metal stand on wheels containing a television shaped like a box. The sight of one of these meant one thing: the teacher essentially wanted a day off and was going to let you watch a film.
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Overhead projectors which used plastic sheets. The projector was often broken. Or the teacher had lost the relevant sheet. Or it was too sunny and no one could see a thing.
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A solitary communal computer which no one knew how to use.
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A geography teacher on a school trip wearing over-ironed bright blue jeans which had spent the rest of the year in the wardrobe but had now been given an outing in an ill-fated bid to look cool.
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The cane, which was whacked across a pupil’s palms or, in the case of more no-nonsense teachers, their buttocks, if they were naughty. It was banned in state-run schools in the UK in 1987 and in private schools 11 years later.
