A new high school will bill its students for their lunches via a retina-scanning device so poor children, who eat for free, won't face ridicule in the cafeteria.
Dr Ed Yates, headmaster of the Venerable Bede school, in Sunderland, yesterday said the advanced eye-recognition software would be in place when the
school opened its doors to 900 students in September.
The school had feared that paying cash for lunches might result in poor students, who receive free food, being exposed and stigmatised, he said.
So officials had made the entire school "cashless". For instance, the device also would track library borrowing and returns.
"We think we are the first [school] in the country to use this," Yates said. "This is not science fiction. It is technology that exists."
