A FINGERPRINT registration system cost a York school more than £25,000 to install – and could lead to breaches in pupil confidentiality, a civil liberties group claims.

The revelation came after privacy campaigners used the Freedom of Information Act to quiz All Saints’ RC School about the system, which is used to speed up attendance registers and library withdrawals and cost the school £25,180 to install.

All Saints is among at least six York secondary schools to use thumbprint recognition technology.

NO2ID, which campaigns against ID cards and the Government’s increasing storage of personal data, estimated it would cost £1.7 million to install the same biometric fingerprinting equipment in all of York’s 70 primary and secondary schools.

And the campaign group has warned new legislation could force schools to breach pupil confidentiality by disclosing the digitally-encoded fingerprints.

Regional co-ordinator James Elsdon-Baker said: “There is a clause hidden in the Coroners And Justice Bill that allows the Government to create these things called information sharing orders.

“If allowed to pass through Parliament, this, or any future Government, could simply create an order that requires the school to pass the sensitive biometric data on to any department or approved external agency.

“We can all guess what will happen when shared information is sent off in the post on a CD.”

The systems involve pupils giving a thumbprint, which is allocated a unique reference number and then stored on computer. When pupils place their thumb against a scanner in future, their record is automatically retrieved.

The school declined to comment on the cost of the system, how it was funded or the implications of the Coroners And Justice Bill.

Previously, head teacher Bill Scriven, has said: “The actual practice is absolutely secure.

“The photograph is not stored in any other way, except as a unique number, so there is no way we could replicate or use the pupil’s thumbprint.

“It’s simply a quick way of accessing a unique reference for that pupil.”

A City of York Council spokeswoman said it was up to individual schools whether they adopted the technology.

“The use of new technology, particularly with respect to library services but also school meals, has been adopted by a number of our schools,” she said. “The feedback from the schools and pupils is very positive.

“The technology is sophisticated and certainly not comparable with the wider public understanding of fingerprinting.

“As a result in 2006/2007, the local authority advised all schools to ensure that parents were fully informed if schools were intending to use systems that use fingerprint recognition systems or other biometric data.”