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Anorak News | Records Breakers

Records Breakers

by | 2nd, December 2003

‘LAST March when the Criminal Records Bureau started performing compulsory background checks on teachers in the wake of the Soham killings, the fee was set at £12 per person.

New teachers are now issued with 17 different types of credit card

Now, you may ask whether student teachers should have to fork out this money so that other people can know what they already know – namely that they are not a danger to the children they are to teach.

In fact, we’re sure that Donald Rumsfeld has some pretty interesting thoughts on the subject, which he may share with us later.

While the fee was only £12 and since it is a one-off charge, teachers were prepared to suck it up.

However, like a mini-version of the Scottish Parliament or Wembley Stadium, the fee quickly doubled to £24 and now, says the Telegraph, is to go up again – to £33.

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, is understandably less than impressed.

‘It is outrageous,’ he says, ‘that having experienced such appalling services from the CRB, which are only now beginning to improve, schools should be facing the burden of yet another increase in its fees.

‘It seems the minute the CRB, which is run by a private company, pleads poverty, the Government puts up the charges.’

Mr Hart would be more worried if he knew that, were charges to continue to rise at the current rate of 275% every two years, the cost would top £5,000 within a decade and by over a million by 2024.

But then there are no maths teachers left in the country to explain that to him…’



Posted: 2nd, December 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink