Any person moving from one setting to another will have a new check paid for out of public funds. But settings that want to check their staff regularly - which is purely voluntary - will have to fork out 50 a time, plus VAT which they cannot recover.
What the public wants to see is that those in contact with children are subject to regular checks. The assurance the CRB provides loses its value over time, as someone can be cleared one day and commit an offence the next.
How can it be either cost-effective or in the public interest for someone making a couple of job moves to be checked two or three times inside a year at the taxpayer's expense, while staff who stay put are, in effect, CRB checked for life? Better to check everybody, say every two years, and allow new applicants to produce an existing CRB disclosure, provided it was obtained after the date of your setting's last check.
Ross Midgley, director, Crocus Early Years Centre, Essex
