Bizarre.

A number of well known childrens authors have stated that they will no longer be undertaking visits to schools because they are now being required to pay £64.00 to obtain a certificate from the Criminal Records Beareu certifying that they are fit persons to have contact with children. The authors quite reasonably state that when they visit schools they speak to children in groups and have almost no contact with children on an individual basis.

On the radio this morning a spokesperson for the CRB stated that the authors were being required to undergo the checks because they were in regular contact with school pupils from a position of trust where they might build up relationships with individual children. A heating engineer then emailed the programme to say that although most of his work involved visiting schools to deal with cooling systems in staff rooms he was now also being asked by schools for a CRB certificate. The CRB spokesman also told him that as a regular visitor to schools he was also in a position where he could build up trust with individuals.

We all want to see children protected as far as is reasonably possible, especially in the wake of horrors like the Soham murders. You wonder however where this mania for CRB disclosure is going to end. Supermarket checkout workers and and staff at fast food outlets have regular access to children and young people, why not CRB checks for them ?. Now we have family freindly pubs why not checks for bar staff and those who wait on tables ?. Why not go the whole hog and make people get their CRB disclosures before they are allowed to have children in the first place ?.

Sadly, for all the CRB checks some paedophiles will always slip through the net. CRB checks offer no cast iron guarantee of stopping the perverts. What they do achieve as far as I can see is making everyone guilty until proved innocent, deterring people who may have a genuine interest in working with young people from going beyond the first hurdle and providing yet another method for government generating income beyond normal methods of taxation.