Safer Recruitment and SCR – The Elephant in the Room
Introduction
The issue of sexual abuse by educators is alarmingly prevalent and has remained a critical concern in the education sector for decades. In a ground-breaking study conducted in 2004, researcher Carol Shakeshaft highlighted this disturbing reality, revealing that 9.6% of students in the US K-12 system had experienced unwanted sexual contact from a school employee. Nearly two decades later, a comprehensive follow-up study by Jeglic et al. in 2023, encompassing over 6,000 US high school graduates, found an increase in these incidents, with 11.7% of children falling victim to educator sexual misconduct.
These findings indicate a persistent and troubling trend: approximately one in ten children are subjected to this egregious form of abuse. Despite the severity of the issue, the studies also uncovered a startlingly low reporting rate of sexual misconduct by school employees – only 4-6%. This underreporting feeds into a dangerous misconception among school leaders, who often perceive such incidents as isolated events occurring elsewhere, not within their own institutions. This denial and lack of awareness contribute significantly to the challenges in implementing effective Safer Recruitment practices.
To address this crisis effectively, it is imperative to shift the mindset of educators. They must acknowledge that sexual abuse by educators is not a remote problem but a widespread and pressing issue within the education system itself. Only by recognizing the scale and severity of the problem can we begin to enact meaningful changes in education regulation and standards for background checking, ultimately safeguarding our children in their learning environments.
We Even Know WHICH Children are More Susceptible
In the stark reality of educator sexual misconduct, the numbers are not just abstract statistics; they translate into a deeply concerning likelihood within our classrooms. Consider a typical class of 30 students. Based on prevailing data, it is statistically probable that three of these students may experience sexual misconduct by an educator during their school career.
However, the predictability of such incidents is even more specific and unsettling. Numerous studies have consistently shown that approximately 75% of victims are female. In a gender-balanced classroom of 15 girls and 15 boys, this disturbingly suggests that two out of the fifteen girls, or roughly one in every 7.5 girls, are likely to be victims. The precision of this prediction becomes grimmer when we consider the characteristics of these potential victims. Research indicates that girls who experience sexual misconduct by educators often display more psychosocial difficulties compared to those who do not report such abuse.
Expanding this perspective to a larger scale – for instance, in a school with 1,000 students – the question arises: Is it realistic to assume that not a single child in your school is affected by this issue? Given the widespread nature of this abuse and the consistency of the statistics, it becomes statistically implausible to believe that educator sexual misconduct is not occurring in every school to some extent. This realization should be a wake-up call to school administrators and policymakers alike, underscoring the urgent need for more effective protective measures and a thorough re-evaluation of current standards in educator screening and recruitment.
So, Why is Safer Recruitment a Problem?
When cases of child harm by school employees become public, invariably, subsequent investigations reveal lapses in adhering to established background check protocols. In many cases, it also becomes apparent that the statutory guidance on which these protocols are based is not sufficiently comprehensive, which drives improvement in standards.
And here is our fundamental problem – it takes a scandal to move the way education thinks, and this is just morally unacceptable.
The concept of ‘Safer Recruitment’ has been pivotal in shaping better working practices and policies in educational institutions worldwide, and have undoubtedly been instrumental in preventing many unsuitable individuals from gaining employment in environments where they could potentially harm children and vulnerable people.
One of the critical shortcomings is with the term ‘Safer Recruitment’ itself. Because Safer Recruitment originated in the UK, and because the UK is perceived as a leader in world education and safeguarding, it is perceived by educators that if they follow such guidance, they are discharging their responsibility to ensure children
But the term conveys that background checks are a one-time requirement at the point of hire, focusing activity exclusively on pre-hiring checks, overlooking the need for ongoing vigilance. This approach fails to account for the possibility of historical allegations surfacing against an employee years after their hiring. Delayed reporting of abuse is a globally recognised and common phenomenon, yet the existing guidance on employee vetting does not address this likelihood.
Schools often align their operational practices to meet inspection standards. In the absence of stringent guidelines that mandate continuous monitoring and reevaluation of employees. . This is particularly concerning in regions like the UAE, where there may be little to no expectation or standardization for schools in this regard.
The reluctance to implement continuous monitoring of international education workers often stems from the perceived administrative burden it would place on schools. However, the safety of children should be the paramount consideration, not convenience or resource allocation.
Just as one must pay to enter a fair, schools must be willing to invest in and embrace more rigorous regulatory measures to protect children from harm. The cost of not doing so is far too great.
Our Efforts are Noble, but the Very Definition of Insanity
The stark reality in every country, is that no matter how much guidance is issued on the topic of Child Protection and Safer Recruitment, the problems and prosecutions keep on coming at an alarming rate.
We recognise the work of those who contributed to the UK Department for Education’s guidance, contributors to the International Task Force on Child Protection, and those who have contributed around the world to raising the awareness of risk in the hiring process for organisations where employees would have unfettered access to children and vulnerable people.
But the elephant in the room that we all surely by now have to acknowledge after decades of failure, is that Safer Recruitment as a concept, is flawed and needs to be dismantled and rebuilt for the modern era.
Some Fundamental Issues
- Thousands of international schools follow the guidance established by the International Task Force on Child Protection, to obtain references covering the last 6 years. Yet we know that victims of child sexual abuse typically report the crimes between 6 and 18 years after the offences were committed.
- Therefore it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that the last 6 years references, are statistically far less likely to yield an adverse safeguarding declaration, than if we collected references for years 6+.
- What about employees who have been in your school with an exemplary record for the last 5 years, was convicted in absentia overseas, or a safeguarding issue arose in a previous school since you took a reference?
- You’d never know, because legacy guidance doesn’t mandate or even suggest that periodically repeating criminal record checks and safeguarding declarations might be a good idea.
These gaps exist, because until now, legacy standards are purposely designed to be diluted down to what is considered reasonable to ask of school administration – in this regard, education is light years behind the regulation of other sectors, where protection of stakeholders comes first, last, and everything in between with no compromises.
Why Does Education Not Learn and Evolve?
Inspection regimes and standards handed down by trusted bodies such as regulators, set requirements for background checking in education astonishingly low.
Whilst we can all agree that no approach is ever going to be perfect, the very premise by which protocols and guidance are developed, executed and quality assured, are all predicated on outdated methods of work that have been consigned to the past in every progressive industry.
Modern compliance design in every other industry, is centred on a fundamental design principal that humans are inherently fallible. People should be designed out of predictable, repetetive, rules-based processes to reduce the risk of failure. People should only be involved in a compliance process when a subjective/judgement decision is required (eg, AFTER data is gathered, based on everything I now know, should I hire this person?)
Yet in education today, and particularly safer recruitment, the sector continues to push solutions to administration problems through creation of policy which extends, rather than reduces reliance on low paid administration staff, required to demonstrate superhuman levels of vigilance across swathes of unstructured data. And the brutal truth is that creating more administration burden is the enemy of compliance.
Can We Learn From Other Industries?
If we look at the UK example of how Financial Services regulate people, the concept of automated, continuous evaluation of those in controlled functions, reflects that at any time before or during employment, critical new information may emerge about an individual’s continued suitability to work in a controlled environment. Yet it took Financial Services many decades, different regulators and many scandals in which a great deal of people were harmed, to arrive at today’s high standard.
How much longer must we continue to place children in harms way, because a serious enough scandal hasn’t yet emerged to make this lax regulation unacceptable?
In mirroring the approach to controlled function monitoring by the UK Financial Conduct Authority, could education not addresses a huge defect in legacy guidance for Safer Recruitment and the Single Central Register, which are unfit for purpose in the complex international schools environment.