By: Robert Falkner - sales manager at iOCO SBT

As crime increases, South African schools and tertiary education institutions find themselves in an ongoing battle to better secure their premises and keep children and students safe. However, adding more electric fencing, razor wire and armed guards doesn’t create a warm and welcoming learning environment. Instead, schools and campuses should be focusing on advanced digital safeguards that offer enhanced situational awareness and more effective - yet unobtrusive - protection.

By deploying solutions such as AI-enabled digital identity platforms, advanced facial recognition with liveness detection and multi-faceted environmental and audio sensors, education institutions can use these new technologies as a force multiplier to enhance the impact of their existing security systems - such as CCTV cameras.

Securing early education

In early learning centres and primary schools, kidnapping is a growing concern. Across South Africa, 4,771 people were kidnapped for ransom, extortion, or human trafficking in just three months from October to December last year, according to the SAPS1. 

As educators seek to secure their schools without making them feel like prisons for children, digital identity and facial recognition technologies offer a simple, yet, state-of-the-art, solution.

By enrolling learners, parents, and guardians, in a digital identity system schools build databases of who is authorised to be on the premises, and who may collect which child. Facial recognition technology, integrated into the school’s CCTV cameras, allows schools to check that children are leaving with authorised caregivers.

If we add a further layer of intelligence, where the number plate of the vehicle and the face of the person that's authorised to collect that child are validated against the digital identity system, we can reduce risk without increasing walls and physical security.

Digital identity and facial recognition integrated into CCTV camera systems also allow schools to better protect and welcome visiting schools and proactively manage who's at the school. They can support event visitor verification, repeat presence detection near gates, post-incident reconstruction by extracting faces present during specific time windows, and can also be used to raise alerts about risky behaviour and rule breaking. 

Proactive safety and security in senior education

At high schools, universities and TVET colleges, gender based violence, crime, gangsterism and violent activism are major concerns. Higher Health, an agency of the Department of Higher Education and Training, has described GBV within the PSET as a ‘scourge’2 while Ciska Jordaan, MP, has stated3: ‘in a sample size of only 7 165 rape crime scenes, 106 rapes have taken place on the premises of schools, universities, day care facilities and colleges'. Schools and tertiary education institutions also report growing levels of lawlessness on campuses.

With advanced digital identity and facial recognition technology security can spot unauthorised people on the property and identify perpetrators of crimes committed on the campus.

In higher education environments, often with hundreds or thousands of people present, it can be difficult for security to control and identify participants in violent protests, for example. Digital identity systems with advanced facial recognition can help distinguish students from outsiders during registration surges and protests. Weapon detection and other analytics can be used to flag armed individuals in real time; and combining face, license-plate and entry point data can help security to reconstruct incidents and build watchlists for repeat offenders. 

Advanced systems also allow institutions to monitor activities where CCTV cameras wouldn’t be appropriate - such as hostel sleeping areas and bathrooms. Integrated sensors with environmental and audio detectors can detect vaping, smoking, fights and gunshots, raise alerts and link to external cameras for identification when occupants exit the sensitive areas. 

Facial recognition systems also help to reduce exam fraud, by verifying that the student enrolled in the digital identity system is indeed the student writing the exam. These systems can be used for roll-call and student monitoring in environments where turnstiles and fingerprint access would slow processes down. Potential use cases for this type of monitoring include tracking whether bursary beneficiaries are actually attending lectures or understanding why particular students are struggling.

These systems can also be used to help plan and enhance on-campus activations and promotions, by allowing organisers to understand which students congregate in which areas at what times.

By enhancing existing systems with intelligent monitoring, digital identity and facial recognition, schools and tertiary institutions can offer more secure and welcoming environments for children and students to focus on learning and development.