School face recognition
Sacred Heart College to trial technology to monitor students, phase out roll call
GEELONG’S Sacred Heart College is among Victorian schools to trial technology that will allow it to phase out morning roll call and spy on students throughout the school day.
Start-up LoopLearn is hopeful its advanced facial recognition technology and “small, unobtrusive devices” that scan campuses for students in real time will be embraced by schools across the state.
The technology is designed to eliminate the need for timeconsuming roll calls and en- sure students can be accounted for on school grounds at all times.
The technology will be tested shortly in a small number of Victorian private schools and the company’s founder Zoe Milne says talks are also being held with several public schools.
But it was hoped the technology would be embraced by “innovative schools” across Australia, because time-consuming roll calls and ensuring the safety and security of students was “a problem for schools in every state”, Ms Milne said.
The LoopLearn website — which says it has a presence in Melbourne and Sydney — states the advanced technology allows teachers to locate students across the whole school, in real time, “with machine vision and learning technology”.
“Small, unobtrusive LoopLearn Devices are easily installed in all spaces and observe which students are present — displaying this information in an easy to use web dashboard and mobile app,” the website states.
“Made for the classroom, these devices scan your learning spaces in real time providing detailed attendance data down to the minute.”
A letter from Sacred Heart College to parents says “the program is based on student facial recognition and can determine a student’s whereabouts on campus at any given time”.
The new software, to be trialed in Sacred Heart College’s Year 11 classes, would also “save a good deal of time in that teachers won’t need to manually mark the attendance roll before each class”, the letter states.
It goes on to say the program is also being tested in a number of other Victorian schools.
A Sacred Heart College spokeswoman said it could not name the other Victorian schools LoopLearn had approached for the technology trial, but they were “well established schools managing large cohorts of students”.
Company founder Ms Milne also refused to name the other Victorian schools that had agreed to trial the technology.
The Victorian Department of Education said it took the privacy of public school students and families very seriously and demanded a privacy impact assessment be undertaken before the introduction of any new technology such as that being proposed by LoopLearn.
A Year 11 Sacred Heart stu- dent said many girls were horrified at the thought of being monitored as they moved throughout the school during the day.
The letter to Sacred Heart parents said the trial would last six weeks.
“We are hopeful the results of the trial will demonstrate improvements to the safety and security of all our students,” it says.
The Sacred Heart spokesperson said: “We don’t know when the trial will commence but we are very keen to see the results; currently, teachers are manually managing attendance rolls six times a day and this often proves a challenge.”