It’s a topic I’ve written about previously – when one of the schools in my constituency was catapulted into the media for fingerprinting children and there were complaints from parents about the fingerprinting.

My colleague Sarah Teather, who is Liberal Democrat Education spokesperson, has just done a survey of primary schools to see which are fingerprinting their children.

What I wrote still seems to hold good:

If we are now saying that fingerprinting children is the best way of ensuring that they get their library books back to the school library – then the world has clearly gone mad!

But this is what is happening both nationally and locally … In my view, treating children like criminals is unlikely to be the best way to imbue the sort of values we should be instilling in the next generation.

Fingerprinting and digitised photographs for protecting the Crown Jewels – fair enough – but fingerprinting and digitised photographs for a children’s book about them? That is a hideously disproportionate response to the issue – and a sense of balance and judgement is one of the many things we should actually be teaching children!

You can read the full piece on my website.