The scope of what schools plausibly might want to know about their students is surprisingly wide. This is  leading to all manner of AI surveillance products being pitched to schools.

This small Australian AI start-up is pitching a ‘faith-based’ version of its ‘HALO’ AI-powered analytics system specifically designed for Australia’s large sector of Catholic schools.

On one hand, bespoke Catholic school surveillance software makes good technical sense – offering easy compatibility with the specific LMS and SIS platforms that Catholic schools tend to use. Yet, HALO AI is also based around the promise of addressing various faith-related aspects of student development that Catholic schools are understandably concerned with.

In this manner, alongside familiar school surveillance features such as real-time attendance ,‘risk’ and ‘well-being’ monitoring HALO AI offers a host of ‘faith formation tracking’ features – monitoring student involvement in things like sacrament preparation activities, religious retreats, prayer groups and the like. As HALO marketing puts it, this allows schools to “support each student’s faith journey with actionable data insights”. 

These values are also incorporated into the system’s ‘Pastoral Care Analytics’, with HALO’s marketing stressing that this monitoring extends well beyond onventional secular notions of pastoral care:

“Created with Catholic educators, not adapted from secular platforms. Track holistic wellbeing, emotional health, and spiritual growth with metrics that align with your school’s Catholic mission and values”.

HALO even promises to make this monitoring a family affair, with the app providing daily updates and to-do lists to parents alerting them how they might best support their child. This is marketed as allowing parents and children to discuss ‘faith milestones’ and “connect faith formation at school with practice at home”.

On one hand, this is all information that Catholic schools and families would likely be keeping an eye on without the help of AI. Nevertheless, the idea that AI can provide predict insights into these intimate and highly personal areas of child’s development could be seen as rather impersonal … if not especially spiritual.