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We are witnessing the increasing use of surveillance technology in schools. Does this mean that our children are safer and benefiting from more effective systems, or are they, as some argue, less free than they ought to be?

One of the curious things about technology is that it can change an entire environment almost by stealth. Take, for example, the internet. Its arrival as a mass medium, which seemed sudden to many people, didn't happen because a central authority decided that the world needed a global computer network. Instead, it happened because all sorts of unrelated individuals and organisations decided it would be useful to join the network-in-progress. Those millions of decisions have brought us many benefits - but they have also brought us high-speed worldwide virus infections, new forms of identity theft, and much easier plagiarism.

Similarly, a set of independent decisions now being made by schools could snowball and have a similar significant, yet unexpected effect. This is the increasing use of surveillance and biometric technologies such as CCTV, webcams and fingerprint and iris scans in school libraries, attendance systems, cafeterias and school playgrounds.

The decision to use such systems is often made for administrative reasons as schools update their library or other systems, and is seemingly thought so uncontroversial that sometimes parents are not consulted for their opinions. Yet privacy activists and others concerned with children's rights, as well as parents, are concerned that we are rushing into a vastly changed school environment with insufficient consideration as to the consequences.

Today's children are in general much more closely monitored than previous generations were. More than 4.5 million CCTV cameras have been deployed in the country at large monitoring public safety, and cameras have also proliferated in schools - fuelled by both concerns for staff and pupil safety and zero-tolerance policies regarding issues such as drugs and bullying. Queen's School in Wisbech has even gone so far as to put cameras in the toilets (outside the cubicles) at a reported cost of £100,000 as an antibullying measure and to prevent pupils from hiding there rather than attending class. Cameras are also moving into the classroom. Lancashire's Sunnybank Preparatory School installed webcams in 2004 so that parents could go online and see their children at school. A February 2005 DfES study of Princeville Primary School, Bradford, which is equipped with 41 cameras surveying all teaching and public areas, suggested that teachers might be able to use the CCTV footage to observe and improve their own classroom technique.

Many people see nothing wrong with using biometrics to automate school processes and monitor pupils closely. Safety is so much of a consideration for many parents that the Future Foundation found in a 2004 survey that 75% of parents were in favour of being able to track their children via GPS devices - unremovable watches. The campaigning organisation LeaveThemKidsAlone, set up by David Clouter, a concerned parent in Cambridge, estimates that some 3,500 British schools have implemented biometric systems and have fingerprinted more than 700,000 children. LTKA also estimates that 20 schools per week are adopting such schemes, with encouragement from central Government via financial incentives such as allowing these systems to be bought using e-learning credits.

Library fingerprinting is the most common biometric system, but other uses are beginning to crop up. St Thomas of Aquinas school in Edinburgh uses swipe cards to take attendance in every classroom. Stirling High School has trialled fingerprinting with a view to using it in a school entry system, the library, and class registration. The Venerable Bede school in Sunderland installed an iris scanning system in its cafeteria. It was removed when it processed only five pupils a minute instead of the 12 the vendor had promised, but staff are hoping to reinstate it if the speed can be improved.

Some of these systems are being introduced to speed up legal requirements such as twice-daily registration. Others, such as fingerprint access to school libraries, are add-ons to existing systems that, in their default state, operate with barcode tags. The claimed benefits vary. Junior Librarian, the most commonly used fingerprint library software, is claimed to make checking books out quicker and more accurate and to simplify administration, since children can't lose their fingerprints as they can library cards. One of the benefits of iris scanning in cafeterias is supposed to be keeping secret which children are entitled to free lunches (often a stigma among young people). All these things have alternatives, even the latter; some US schools manage this by giving each child a barcoded card.

Most people - school governors, teachers, librarians - seem to see the decision to install biometric systems as purely administrative. "It never occurred to me there was anything wrong with it," is a common reaction to the suggestion that the systems are controversial in some quarters. Other, more compelling, reasons have also been given for introducing surveillance technologies in schools. Comments about Micro Librarian Systems include the suggestion from Deputy Headteacher Nikki Lamond from the Eye Primary School in Peterborough that it makes children more independent in the library. Tony Davies, Headteacher at St Matthew's Primary School in Cambridge, told the Cambridge Evening News, "The kids don't have to worry about losing their library card and it's really easy to use." He also told the BBC that, after having the system explained, most parents ceased to object. Finally, Scunthorpe Headteacher Angela Hewson, at Eastcroft Church of England Primary School, has called the system "fun" and said that "children were excited and enthralled" by it. Even the children themselves have divided opinions about the use of surveillance technologies in schools, a poll taken for BBC's Newsround website revealed.

There are two issues that concern parents and other activists. First, the taking and storage of the biometric data itself. Second, the lack of consultation beforehand. The second of these issues is as contentious as the first, even though the DfES said in September 2006 that, in its view, schools do not need to ask permission.

His daughter's school's failure to ask consent, however, was what made Clouter concerned enough to set up LTKA to rally opposition. "As a parent," he says, "I consider schools fingerprinting my child as an unjustified, disproportionate and unnecessary invasion of her fundamental right to privacy under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act and Article 16 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child."

The Information Commissioner's office is drawing up guidelines for the use of biometric data outside of police work, but for the moment seems to be leaning toward agreeing that parents don't have to be consulted. Under the Data Protection Act, it's the subject's consent that is needed.

In early September, David Smith, the deputy Information Commissioner, told The Register, "The Data Protection Act is about the pupil's rights, not the parents' rights over the children's information." Yet, in other rulings, as The Register pointed out, the ICO has determined that, although children can sign up for posted direct marketing materials without their parents' permission, consent is required before they can hand over detailed personal information. "How," asks Clouter, "can a 4 year-old give informed consent?" Schools, objectors argue, ask permission for everything else. Why not for using biometrics?

England's Children's Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley-Green agrees but suggests that it is crucial for children themselves to be consulted: "For young people to feel safe and secure in school it is important they understand the implications of the technology and be well informed about how any data collected about them is to be used. They should also have the right to consent, or not consent, to such measures being implemented."

But the lack of consultation and consent wouldn't be an issue if these parents - and politically active privacy advocates - didn't have serious concerns over the use of the technology itself.

IT specialists list a number of technical concerns. First of all, they are concerned about the security of the collected data over time and where else it might end up. Vendors say that the systems do not store complete biometrics, but parents still worry that the data stored today could eventually constitute a privacy risk for their children.

Terri Dowty, a former teacher who runs Action on Rights for Children, is particularly concerned, in the light of the tracking databases created by the Children Act 2004, that legislation may allow a wide range of Government, medical and social workers access to all children's records. These are exempt from the Data Protection Act, leaving both schools and parents without the power to prevent it.

Furthermore, the biometric recognition systems incorporated into these school administration systems are not necessarily proprietary systems that are used exclusively for these purposes. The fingerprint module in Junior Librarian, for example, is bought in from a third-party company that supplies its technology to a range of other vendors for many other uses. Isn't it possible that today's database of children's fingerprints, sometime in the future, could unlock some completely different application and set of data? There are certainly known analogies for this sort of thing: just recently, it was discovered that commonly available standard hotel minibar keys can unlock the supposedly heavily secured electronic voting machines supplied for US federal elections by Diebold.

Initiatives such as the ID card will make the use of biometrics as identifers increasingly important and pervasive. If, says Dowty, children get in the habit of using biometrics casually for relatively trivial purposes, "how will they learn to guard their information carefully when we have ID cards and biometric passports?

If anything, they should be taught to be very careful about where they put their fingerprints and iris scans, and so on. Because you can't replace them." After all, she adds, one of the key reasons that biometrics are being used in security systems is that they are supposed to be especially secure. But the more - and more casually - you use them, the easier it is for them to be stolen or copied. In other words, if someone finds out your password, you can replace it with another - but if your biometric is compromised, you can't get a new iris or set of fingers.

Dowty, as an ex-teacher, also makes a point that suggests that the use of biometrics may not be consistent with positive teacher-student relationships: fingerprint scanning and other automated systems remove what she feels is an important few seconds of personal contact between a teacher and each pupil. In those seconds of engagement, the teacher might notice that the pupil is unhappy or troubled; but if nothing else the teacher acknowledges that pupil in a human way. Remove that personal contact and "it increases the alienation in big schools," she says.

Perhaps we should also ask about the greater implications for children's learning. With the increasing emphasis on personalised learning - education matching the needs of the learner rather than the other way round, and empowering learners to develop skills in ways that are relevant to them - could it be that the use of these technologies might inhibit or even restrict their learning experience? Clouter agrees but makes the point on a wider social scale: managing school necessities like lunch money and library cards, he argues, is part of how children learn to take responsibility for their adult lives.

In 1897, the American educational theorist John Dewey wrote, "I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform." Consider that in the light of other national trends: pervasive CCTV cameras, the advent of the national identity card and its accompanying national population register to track all British residents from cradle to grave, as well as increased law enforcement powers brought in after the terrorist attacks of 2001 and 2005. National identity cards are controversial now, but privacy advocates argue that biometric and surveillance systems in schools will act as a softener so that, by the time the next generation is grown up, identification and tracking systems will seem natural.

The present generation of parents has had no such conditioning. Simon Davies, executive director of Privacy International, has long argued that schools are taking an unrecognised risk.

"There is something extremely personal about a biometric," he says, "and if there was a single disaster like information being placed into the hands of the wrong people, if there was data loss resulting in death or injury, or if the database was transmitted unintentionally to the wrong recipient or was stolen in a burglary, the psychological effect on parents would be massive."

So, for the time being, the jury is out - indeed the jury has not even been appointed. Some people are so convinced of the benefits that they are using the technology right now, while others are concerned enough to establish activist groups to give a voice to their concerns. Maybe the time has come for a debate on this issue so that we can all fully understand both the positive and negative aspects of using surveillance technology in schools - and then, at least, we can all make an informed choice as to whether or not to sign up.

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