Headteachers slam 'disproportionate' vetting database

yeah

"The fact that the ISA continue to instance the case of Ian Huntley in support of their work might therefore be considered in some quarters to be little more than cynical spin"

Yeah but the kind of dribbling idiots and thought control fascists that want everyone bagged and tagged believe in this kind of drivle (they either believe it becouse they're dribbling idiots, or believe it will let them do what they want becouse the dribbling idiots support it.)

I think the head teachers are missing the point

Head teachers today condemned it as bureaucratic and unlikely to guarantee the safety of those it is meant to protect.

The database is meant to protect officials. In which job it will do a good job.

agreed

Agree with the headteachers. There is so much stigma and hassle around volunteering to work with young people at the moment it just puts people off.

This idea that the State can regulate every interaction between adults and children is madness, it will end up with more suspicion and less interaction between the generations, causing more problems, not fewer.

We all remember Huntly, but...

...the real risk to children is more likely at home than at school, from strangers. By running around with their heads of fire screaming 'we must protect the children' and then instituting daft over-engineered vetting schemes, the Govt distracts from the real risk. Better to run a huge advertising campaign to say: here are the signs that your child might be being abused: changes in personality, secretiveness, over-eagerness to please, bed-wetting, physical changes such as bruising or blood,...etc'. For every murderous Huntly, there are two dozen dads or boyfriends (and yes, mothers or girlfriends, but mostly as accomplices) or vicars or priests who are making life hell on earth for some children.

Having alert staff at schools with the time to check up on adults in the building, sensible security to and from school and so on offers good protection. Simple record-checking vetting procedures would merely be another line of defence.

"It is also worth reminding you that Ian Huntley might well not have been exposed by the CRB system"

It's also worth reminding them that there's no evidence that this or any other knee-jerk, media prompted, "won't somebody think of the children" measure has made any difference to the number of abuse cases.

Actually, to be fair, I do expect the current legislation to make a difference to the number of abuse cases in the future. I expect the number to increase as children find they have fewer role models to turn to as the voluntary sector takes a massive dive.

Indeed, yes

"The school leaders believe that the results of the scheme will be largely negative. There will be reduced parent volunteer support in schools, as well as difficulties in obtaining emergency support staff such as plumbers, heating engineers and midday meals supervisors."

And indedd, yes, we have beenn led by both NuLabour and the media into believing in being afraid, a war of paranoia if you like.

I do not doubt that there is evil out there in the wild world, I do believe the media feeds the paranoia of fear.

The whole point being, actual paedo cases last year were less than .001% of ALL criminal convictions, I do not point this out as a defence, however armed robbery offences outnumbered child sex offences by an order of many magnitudes.

The media has played on our repugnance for for child related offences,(and rightly so,IMHO), but in doing so has led in many cases to the trivialisation of many other heinous crimes, of which yhe going rate I'm led to believe, of rape is , if convicted, only equal to 1 year, armed robbery=3, aggravated burglary=6,murder=10, yet speeding at 34 in a 30 mph zone = the possibility of 6 months.

It is also about time the judicial system got real, in the same vein, as which we, as a populace, elect these power addicted MP's to make and pass laws in our name.

disproportionate to risk

Those are three words that sum up just about everything that Labour has done. Throwing money and resources at problems which are very rare, while stitching up the majority who get squeezed for ever greater taxes.

Who needs to register?

"The fine print behind these terms is currently under review, but at present, guidance suggests that any individual who has contact with a particular class of vulnerable people – not necessarily the same individuals – three or more times in any three month period will need to be registered."

Every police force worker, then....

The only way...

It doesn't matter what the outcome of a low level 'check' will show, the outcome of consultancy on the matter, the Labour government has and will continue to ride roughshod through any negative comments of *their* system.

I predict the only way to get rid of this stupid nonsense is for the thing to cause so much harm to society, to be so cumbersome to run to be almost unworkable, then and only then might the government back down.

We've seen this before, look at IR35. Predicted to be a mess by a multitude of organisations, described before it came into existance as "unworkable" and indeed it has turned out to be so, but yet the government continues with it.

Why? Because they're too embarassed to admit they got things wrong. "We're the government, we never get things wrong." They fear that by admitting failure they will be seen to be truely incompetent, which as we all know, they are anyway.

Commonsense? When has any left wing Labour government been sensible?

@AC - it's supposed to work this way

I feel you are quite correct. Look at immigration, all these unintended consequences, accidents that keep happening, various large numbers of immigrants overlooked, not followed up, repeatedly portrayed as a coc*-up; turns out, that 10 years ago the plan was officially put together to allow them in in large numbers.

The immigration system is working exactly as the Labour government designed it to work, it's working exactly as they want. But for 10 years they couldn't state what their official behind the scenes policy was, they had to hide it, because they knew it was wrong, they knew the public would never agree to it. So they kept it quiet, but how else could the explain that large numbers of immigrants were getting in and staying in the country, so they had to explain things away as ''accidents', 'mistakes'.

And so I feel it is with these databases, vetting procedures.

The fact is, the government has the financial resources to spend on experts to assess all sides of the coin, to assess the impact a new process will have, to look at the benefit, to look at the consequences of introduction of that process/technology will have.

It was even official number 10 policy that before any new laws/rules were introduced that would have a significant effect on a section of industry that an impact assessment be carried out.

I am sure the government has already considered the impact of what these vetting procedures are and they've decided to disregard them.

But given the outcry that is now taking place they have to be seen to be responding to that outcry, it would be inappropriate not to listen to the true experts, the teachers and the organisations that represent them. To ignore such high profile bodies would be foolish, particularly so in the run up to the election.

So the government is bound to promise a review, a check, but it will come to nothing.

@Good plan

That already came up where I used to live.

They were creating a super-mega-intensive-educational-academy-facilty (I think we used to call them schools) which put a secondary school with a 6th form on the same site as a junior school.

The idea was to share facilities and save costs.

But it meant any A-level students that reached 18 would have to be checked because there were also 10year olds on the same site.

The proposed solution was then to duplicate all the facilities and put a barbed wire fence down the middle to separate them.

In the end the plan was abandoned because of the fears of parents for the safety of their children.

Governments are meant to work for the people

But, of course they are taking an over authoritarian stance on nearly everything, and we are hurtling dictatorship.

Interestingly, it is true, if you have nothing to hide, you have everything to fear.

One good thing about database' is GIGO

I opted out of Labour's database privacy invading Britain by emigrating.

The only good thing about all this mismanaged British government computerisation is that the users (government) are so myopically convinced it works that feeding Garbage In really does result in Gospel Out. The added bonus is that they are so inept with implementation.

And I am dedicated in furthering their misplaced belief.

Since the UK uses linked databases it follows that updated incorrect data ripples through the others. Another country whose passport I use employed purposely unlinked database, for reasons of privacy, and to stop civil servants from rummaging through them looking for data. They must be effective as the police complain about them. It takes very much more work to fill these databases with inaccurate data.

If people only knew what data government has on them they would be much, much more noisy about privacy stripping activities by the authorities.

The real reasons behind this idiocy

It's easy to accuse people (particularly politicians) of evil motives, but the reality is much sadder than that. These idiotic attempts to centrally control and administer human relationships are invented with the best possible intentions by narrow minded inhuman zombies drawn from the same population as the rest of us.

We have a culture in which competition and aggressiveness dominate and are lauded - in which everyone is expected to exploit or be exploited (in many cases, both). As a result we have poor social cohesion (i.e. nobody much cares about anyone else) and trust is difficult to establish.

The optimum solution to this would be to encourage people to take responsibility for each other within the community (as indeed was done in the not too distant past). That would help people learn again to care and trust, but it's a slow process that takes much longer than the life of a government. It would also entail some dismantling of "consumer culture" that would be resisted hand over fist by the "marketplace". For proof, just look at the attitude of bankers to bonus limitation.

Because government always seeks "quick wins", the alternative that comes most readily to mind is to legislate for control. It doesn't achieve the ostensible objective, but that doesn't matter. It does achieve another objective - a sense of having taken decisive action.

The really sad part is that impersonal rule-based attempts at regulation of social and personal interactions (all the way from "political correctness" to this prospective debacle) undermine the opportunities of ordinary people to learn to fend for themselves by making sound individual judgements based on caring. Just as when pocket calculators became commonplace the skill of mental arithmetic was largely abandoned, people are already relying on database-derived rubber stamps of personal probity rather than paying attention and using their intuition to decide for themselves who is OK and who is creepy. This legislation will only exacerbate the trend.

To anticipate the counter-argument - yes, in the absence of the legislation there would be the occasional accident. That's very sad but unavoidable in life, and there's absolutely no warranty that in its presence their number will be fewer. The regulation of trust is itself no guarantee of safety. Quite the opposite - it will in the long term make people more vulnerable to the abuses it is attempting to control. The worst possible condition (to which we are being inexorably driven by increasing centralised rule-based administration of human relations) is to be physically alive and still at risk but emotionally dead, believing our safety lies in responding as automata to standard stimuli, whether commercial triggers to empty our wallets or social triggers to trust or not trust because a database entry tells us to. To quote Benjamin Franklin "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety and will lose both".