ABSTRACT
Although written over a century and a half ago and concerning the principle of a panopticon design for a prison, many people working in post-16 education in Britain in the late twentieth century might have been forgiven for thinking that it was describing the systems of inspection that were introduced at that time. Bentham also wrote about extending the idea to institutions like hospitals and schools, where the ‘inmates’, be they patients or pupils, might be supervised in the form of omnipresent surveillance. If we extend the principle one step further we can see that those conducting the initial surveillance might themselves become the subject of surveillance, and logic dictates that this might eventually
become a chain. Twisting the old dictum ‘who educates the educators?’ we would then find ourselves asking ‘who supervises the supervisors?’
