How the safety checks backfired

ON ANY ordinary start to the new school year, Durham Johnston's headteacher Richard Bloodworth and his staff are pretty busy. There are 1,500 students in school, scores of them new faces who need new timetables. It includes 1,200 pupils with up to ten classes each - that's 12,000 classes, plus the sixth form who don't enrol until their exam results come through.

The hectic start to the year is normal, but this year, headteachers such as Mr Bloodworth have had to face the extreme frustration caused by the much publicised delays with the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB).

A week before school started yesterday, Mr Bloodworth was still waiting for up to eight members of staff, a mixture of teachers and office workers, to be cleared by the CRB, a public-private partnership between the Home Office and services giant Capita.

It was only yesterday morning that he received confirmation that the last member of staff had been cleared.

"It has been unbelievably frustrating," he says. "It seems as if no one realises the level of staff clearance needed at this time of year."

The Liverpool-based Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) was launched in March this year and was trumpeted as a new 'one-stop-shop' for organisations to run checks on future staff. It was supposed to complete full checks on all those working with children within three weeks.

For teachers and other school staff, such as caretakers and classroom assistants, the checks are two-fold. Names are compared with List 99 - the Government list of people deemed unsuitable to work with children - as well as being run past police for evidence of a criminal record.

But within a few weeks criticism started over the time taken to carry out checks. The Home Office initially said it would be acceptable for staff to start work on the basis that they had been checked by List 99 and were awaiting CRB clearance.

But by the end of August, and notably after the killings of Soham youngsters Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, DfES guidance changed so that staff had to be double checked before they were allowed to start work. Despite the Home Office taking on 100 extra staff, the backlogs continued and there were calls that the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) had overreacted to events at Soham.

Says Richard Bloodworth: "I don't want to minimise the seriousness of only having appropriate people to work with children, but the point that seems to be being missed is that this furore has been caused by DfES suddenly changing the rules in the middle of the summer holidays in the light of the appalling events in Cambridgeshire.

"Those two people (caretaker Ian Huntley and classroom assistant Maxine Carr) have yet to be tried and yet this whole country has been turned on its head. I think there's something wrong there."

Joan Olivier, headmistress of Lady Margaret School in Parson's Green, south-west London, said she was obeying the DfES guidance that staff who have not been cleared should not be allowed to work with children, even under supervision. But she had had to tell parents of 180 out of the school's 590 pupils to keep their children at home yesterday because she was awaiting clearance for ten staff out of 50, including seven teachers.

She says: ''I'm very sympathetic about what happened in Soham but I do think this reaction that the whole population of the teaching profession must be looking to do harm to children is an over-reaction, to say the least. I've had three parents on the phone who are extremely cross about it and agree it's an over-reaction.''

Yesterday, local education authorities could be found bending the rules when it came to Government guidance and allowing some unchecked staff to work under supervision. Several local education authorities, including Middlesbrough, said teachers whose checks had not come back could work with children - provided they were not left alone with them.

To the teaching unions, the disarray does not come as a surprise. John Heslop, a regional officer with the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) says: "The CRB underestimated the nature and the size of the task they were contracted to undertake. I do think they started off in good faith, but they underestimated how many applications for clearance they would get and how complex a process it is to get that done. They misjudged the situation quite dramatically.

"It is causing significant problems. The Times Education Supplement and the Secondary Headteachers' Association did a survey last week which showed that schools still had around 4,000 vacancies which have not been filled. If you add that to the 7,000 staff which have not been cleared by the CRB, then it causes an awful lot of disruption."

The region's colleges are also among those suffering from the disruption and the Association of Colleges says it has consistently warned the CRB that it needs more staff to cope and to invest in information technology so checks can be done quickly over the Internet.

Colleges are already facing a staffing crisis as thousands of lecturers defect to the school sector, lured by better pay and better prospects. This latest setback will hit the sector hard, says the AOC.

The association says that one college has had 44 staff checks outstanding since the start of July, and that it has been contacted by more than 100 colleges facing similar problems over long delays.

David Gibson, the AOC's chief executive, goes as far as to say the CRB is not giving colleges the same priority as schools.

"The AOC is extremely disappointed to see the education of students across the country badly affected by a problem that was anticipated and could have been avoided," he says. "The Association of Colleges has warned the CRB about the problems for many months and although the CRB has now taken on more staff, we believe this is too little too late."

By lunchtime yesterday, the CRB had cut the urgent checks backlog which stood at 9,600 on Sunday, to around 7,000.

Criminal justice minister Lord Falconer, who has responsibility for the Criminal Records Bureau, says the prospect of a U-turn will be "kept under review."

He says: ''I don't think one should talk about panic nor do I think one should make the connection with Soham. The Government had to make a decision as to what was the appropriate degree of safety at the beginning of the term. The advice they gave, which is clear, is that only fully-vetted teachers and the appropriate ancillary staff should be allowed to start teaching.''

But at Durham Johnston School, where staff disruption has been narrowly averted, Richard Bloodworth points out the knock-on effects of the strict guidelines. "It is important that staff are checked, but it's also important that the schools run properly," he says.

"I haven't had to send anyone home but there are schools who have had to or have had to close. When that happens pupils have to go home and their parents are probably out at work. There is a balance of probabilities here. Are they safer in school among people we work with and watch all the time, or are they safer on the streets?"