Imagine receiving a text message from your child's school informing you they have just visited the toilet. For parents at one north shore Sydney private school, that is now a routine reality. The school has installed CCTV cameras to monitor students entering and exiting bathroom facilities during class time, with an automated system alerting parents by text message each time their child takes a bathroom break.
The practice, reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, is being framed by the school as a pastoral care measure, a way to keep families informed and to deter students from lingering in bathrooms to avoid class. At face value, there is something the school can point to: absenteeism from class is a genuine concern, and parents often appreciate information about their children's school day. Private schools paying significant fees are expected to demonstrate accountability for how students spend their time.
But the moment you examine the detail, the measure starts to look less like duty of care and more like an institutional overreach that most families would find deeply uncomfortable, regardless of the justification offered.
Where the law draws the line
Under the NSW Workplace Surveillance Act 2005, there are specific areas of a workplace that cannot be monitored under any circumstances. Toilets, change rooms, and shower facilities sit explicitly in that prohibited category. The Act also requires that any overt surveillance be visible to those being watched and that employees receive at least 14 days' notice before cameras are switched on.
The catch, and it is a significant one, is that this legislation is designed primarily to protect employees. Students are not employees. Independent schools operate under a separate regulatory framework, and the application of surveillance law to students in non-government schools remains, at best, unclear. The NSW Department of Education's own guidance states that surveillance in toilets is prohibited in all circumstances for its schools, but that guidance applies to government schools, not independent ones paying their own way.
This is precisely the kind of regulatory gap that benefits no one. Schools operating outside the government system should not, by virtue of their independence, enjoy greater freedom to monitor students in intimate settings. The NSW Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act, which does apply more broadly, requires that personal information be collected only for purposes directly relevant to the collecting organisation's functions. It is a stretch to argue that recording and transmitting data about a teenager's toilet habits constitutes information that is relevant, proportionate, or necessary.
The case for intervention, and why it falls short
Proponents of such systems will argue that schools have a duty to know where students are at all times, that parents are entitled to be informed, and that the alternative, students disappearing from class for extended periods, creates real supervision and safety risks. These are not trivial points. Schools are legally responsible for students in their care, and any measure that strengthens that chain of accountability has a defensible starting position.
There are also parents who actively want this level of visibility. For families paying upwards of $30,000 a year in school fees, a degree of intensive monitoring might feel like value for money. The school's decision to involve parents in real-time, rather than keeping the data internal, could even be characterised as transparency rather than surveillance.
The problem is that the research does not support intensive monitoring as a pathway to better student outcomes. A growing body of evidence suggests that excessive surveillance can impede students' learning, social development, and mental health. Young people describe privacy as a fundamental sense of security and wellbeing; when that sense is violated, it creates what researchers describe as lasting feelings of ill-ease. A teenager who knows that their trip to the bathroom triggers an alert to their parents is a teenager who may avoid going to the toilet at all, hold on through discomfort, or develop anxiety around a basic bodily function. That is not a pastoral care outcome anyone should be proud of.
The broader question schools need to answer
Education is not a partisan issue, but it has become a political football. The instinct to surveil and report, to produce data points that demonstrate engagement and accountability, is increasingly embedded in how schools, particularly private ones, operate. In many cases, technology is available and parents demand it. The question schools rarely ask is whether deploying that technology is actually good for the students at the centre of it.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has long emphasised that children and young people have privacy rights, and that organisations working with children must give special consideration to whether data collection is genuinely in their interests. A text message to a parent every time their child visits the bathroom is a hard thing to defend on that standard.
What this north shore school's system reveals is a broader failure to ask a simple question before deploying surveillance technology: just because we can, does that mean we should? Good school governance, whether in the independent sector or the public one, requires that data collection be proportionate, purposeful, and genuinely oriented toward student welfare. Monitoring bathroom entry and exit times fails that test, regardless of the intent behind it.
Reasonable people can debate how much information parents should receive about their children's school days, and where the line between oversight and intrusion sits. But most parents, if asked directly, would struggle to articulate why a text message about their child's toilet visit makes anyone safer, happier, or better educated. That is where the conversation needs to start.