UNSUITABLE teachers and assistants are able to get jobs in schools because of the difficulties in placing them on List 99, according to a former deputy director of the Children’s Legal Centre.
Yvonne Spencer, who is also an education lawyer with the Colchester firm Fisher Jones Greenwood, has tried several times to have teachers placed on List 99, banning them from schools, but has been refused.
She said: “There are four different lists held by various departments and no link between them. It is quite impossible for schools to do these checks.” One enormous loophole, she said, was that the requirement to do criminal records checks came into being only in 2002. “If an employee since then is cautioned for an offence but has not changed jobs, then that won’t come to light. There is no requirement for these checks to be updated.”
Ms Spencer added that she had applied to the Secretary of State to have teachers placed on List 99 but had had her application rejected.
In one such case a teacher was alleged to have hit a child with special needs. The allegation had been upheld by a social services child protection inquiry but the governors of the school, which was voluntary-aided, declined to dismiss the teacher. “In my view this teacher did not have the disposition to be working with such children but the application was just rejected,” she said.
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Ms Spencer said that in addition to List 99 and the sex offenders register, there was a list held by the Department for Education and Skills for non-teachers who might pose a risk under the Protection of Children Act, and a list held by the Department of Health aimed at ensuring the protection of vulnerable adults.
But there were also many cases where an allegation might have been made and not substantiated, with the person concerned ending up on a list and thereafter not being able to find a job. “There could easily be hundreds of people working in schools on these lists, who may have been cautioned. But it does not mean they all should be thrown out as posing a risk to children.”
Entries on the Criminal Records Bureau were at the discretion of a chief constable and could be made without “counter-balancing” evidence, she said. “There urgently needs to be one joined-up system as recommended by Sir Michael Bichard (who conducted the Soham inquiry) three years ago. Why has it not been done?”