At last some common sense on safeguarding from Ed Balls

Written by David Lyscom

I appeared on the BBC News Channel on Sunday 13th December to welcome the announcement by Ed Balls on the Vetting and Barring of adults coming into contact with children. I said that Ed Balls’ interview on the Andrew Marr programme was belated recognition that the original scheme was badly flawed. ISC had been warning about this for some time, and had made a substantial submission to Sir Roger Singleton’s review. We are pleased that he has listened.

Our main concerns were

- Language exchanges and sporting tours, where children were put up with families. We were concerned that arrangements brokered by or sanctioned by schools would be caught by the new legislation so that parents would need to be vetted.
- Community service, where children over 16 would need to be vetted if they came into contact with other children or vulnerable adults.
- Boarding school children spending weekends or half terms with their friends’ families. Here too arrangements must be blessed by schools so might not have been seen as private arrangements.
- Occasional visitors who go to lots of different schools like authors, MPs or, dare one say, the Chief Executive of ISC.

We hope that the recommendations by Sir Roger will now be implemented in such a way that our concerns are met. We will await the detail of the DCSF response before passing judgement and will be discussing it with them. But initial impressions are that this is a victory for ISC and the teachers’ and heads’ associations who have lobbied hard.

Related posts:

• The Red Tape Peril
• A Bright Spark: ‘Gifted and Talented’ in the Independent Sector
• Private school perceptions – looking forward
• How much of the population actually went to independent schools: 7% or 14%?
• You’ll never be bored at boarding school

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 2:31 pm by David Lyscom and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.