Fears for their own privacy is the most common reason why teachers would refuse to wear a body camera, a TES survey reveals.

Two-thirds of teachers - 62.3 per cent - surveyed said that they would be prepared to wear a body camera in school. Of those, a third - 35.1 per cent - believed that it would help them to monitor pupil behaviour.

Of the 600 teachers surveyed by TES, 37.7 per cent said that they would not be willing to wear a body camera in school.

One in five of these teachers - 21 per cent - feared for their own privacy. Similar proportions - 19.3 per cent - worried about being spied on by school management.

Roughly one in five also worried about pupils’ privacy, and about the potential for the cameras or the recordings to be misused by school management. And 17.9 per cent said that they had fundamental issues with surveillance in general.

Less negative

Tom Ellis, principal lecturer in the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies at Portsmouth University is unsurprised by such reactions. “When you introduce new technology, if people haven’t had experience of it already, people tend to regard it as negative, initially,” he said.

“But, as they get used to it, people get less negative - they see it’s useful.”

But most believed that they were safe from having cameras imposed on them: only one in 10 - 10.9 per cent - thought that there would ever be a time when body cameras were mandatory in schools.

The full TES feature on body cameras will be published in TES magazine on Friday, 10 February. This week’s TES magazine will be available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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