Know Your People (KYP) by 10k Schools is designed to create a 100% consistent process for every single new hire – and also to retrospectively check existing school employees to the same standard. Using AI and automation, process consistency is the enemy of those who seek to subvert a school’s recruitment protocols in the knowledge that human error and bias can easily be manipulated, thus enabling undesirable individuals from being able to obtain work in schools.

KYP by 10k Schools:

• Requires no prior knowledge of safeguarding to use effectively
• Eliminates document collection by HR/school admin
• Eliminates the need to follow up on missing information/documents
• Flags every single risk and defect employees and candidate profiles against the world’s most stringent standard

As an industry we seem to have unconsciously moved away from the real purpose of identification – e.g. is this candidate/employee who they say they are?” Research has identified that schools have inadvertently fallen into the trap of collecting ID to tick an inspection box or to fulfil an immigration requirement.

We complete biometric validation against government issued ID to evaluate likeness, whilst validating ID and extracting data to ensure accuracy of name spellings, date of birth etc. By using biometric scanning, temporary features such as hairstyle or colour, growing a beard become irrelevant. To close the circle, if the individual is hired, schools should upload the photo taken for school ID and complete the 3 way check to ensure the person reporting for duty is the person who applied for the job.

For candidates to achieve the highest verification scores, we also collect and cross check birth certificates to ascertain whether name changes have occurred.

The reality is that we have an inherent conflict in who candidates want to GIVE as a reference, and whom we want to RECEIVE a reference from. A candidate’s default tendency will be to select whichever referee is prepared to offer the most sympathetic reference. In most cases there is no ill_intent here, it’s a natural human behaviour that you would want a reference to come from a person who knows your work the best, rather than the Principal who may have had little direct interaction with the candidate.

However as with our other standards, we must return to the underlying purpose of background checks, which is to obtain information on OUR terms as a school, not the information as the candidate wishes to present it. The risks of not strictly complying with this can be dire.

Our standard is to obtain a full career employment history and associated references – we don’t accept that because there may be challenges obtaining old references, this is a reason not to at least try (read our article about this here), as it is older references which are statistically more likely to hold adverse safeguarding declarations. We confirm employment dates, safeguarding declarations and optionally performance, and we insist that the reference is provided by someone with direct access to the employee records – eg, the reference must come from HR or the Principal.

We get that it can be difficult for people to obtain checks, that documents get lost and life just happens! But in this day and age, is it really acceptable that excuses can be made for such an important issue or that people are carrying round documents years out of date? Time and time again, public enquiries cite incomplete criminal record checks as major contributory factor allowing unsuitable individuals to move from school to school undetected. 

Employees will also frequently push back on availability of checks from previous countries, usually due to hearsay and without having exhausted available avenues to obtain missing documentation. This alone shows the risks that many schools may have been taking due to misinformation, or worse, on the word of a prospective employee.

Through the 10k Schools platform, candidates are able to apply for their Criminal Record checks in over 180 countries, including the ability to obtain Enhanced DBS checks in the UK. This means schools are not reliant on knowing the availability of checks (and how to get them) in every country – thus removing a huge potential risk factor which is too often overlooked.

The internet is a big place, and we must always be conscious that predators are good at covering their tracks by relegating adverse media down the Google rankings. It’s remarkably easy to do this just by starting a blog (for example). Without a clear search plan, there’s a very good chance you’ll miss the important snippets of information on the internet unless your search is structured and consistent.

Just putting someone’s name into Google isn’t sufficient, especially if it’s a common name where specific results relating to your candidate or employee may be buried on page 10 or 50 of results – especially when anyone with basic media know-how, can learn how to manipulate search results to push adverse media down the rankings.

Few, if any of us in education know how to put together a perfect Boolean search string, and even if we did the length of search string required would be unlikely to be replicated 100% of the time without spending an inordinate amount of time. Find out how 10k Schools executes the most accurate adverse media searches in multiple languages, logs the outcomes and prompts schools to repeat the exercise periodically.

All candidates are profiled for compliance against the 10K Standard and direct scoring against your job criteria to determine best fit. This provides the ability to filter directly to present only relevant and suitable candidates for the job and avoid wasting your time reviewing irrelevant candidates. We enable you to see a synopsis of everything you need to longlist a candidate without needing to click into the detailed profile. Once you have collated your longlist, you can interrogate the candidate’s profile to make your shortlisting /interview decision.

Our process minimizes the number of clicks, providing the fastest, most effective shortlisting capability available in education.

Every global standard recommends you should not use CVs to make selection decisions. This is because best practice both in fair selection practice and safer recruitment requires that candidates are presented in a uniform format, with the data relevant to selection shown consistently. This also means that obtaining profiles from multiple job portals such as TES, Teachaway etc in their formats creates both risk and unfairness in the process where the profile format is different depending on how the candidate applied. Remember, job boards want to promote THEIR candidates.

Application via a standardised format, is not a new requirement, it has always been a mandatory requirement in the UK – hiring from a CV and asking a candidate to complete an application form after selection is an unacceptable fudge!

From a Safeguarding perspective, our process ensures that candidates cannot distract those doing the screening via multiple fonts, fancy graphic design or the order in which they present the data. Only relevant information is presented to those doing shortlisting, in the format the school requires, rather than showing the story the candidate wants to tell – leading to better, faster, safer hiring decisions.

The reason 10k Schools exists, is that the most fundamental risk in safer recruitment is human error. We are in an age of technology whereby if all the data which makes up the Register can be collected autonomously, flagging only the issues Principals need to see, we significantly improve the effectiveness of the entire concept of the Single Central Register.

You can view the 10k Schools SCR by ‘Candidate’, ‘Employee’ or ‘Contractor’ – allowing you to manage each category of individual during pre- or post-employment.

The 10k Schools platform calculates compliance scores for each candidate against a gold-standard process. It stands to reason therefore, that when you apply scores to a process or individual, those data points can be rolled up to visualise risk across a school, a group of schools or company, or geographical region or country. The platform aggregates data of all 10K Schools to provide external benchmarks. This means if, for example, you are an outstanding school with a fee-point of ‘x’ based in city ‘y’, we can identify the aggregated scores of similar schools enabling you to understand wider performance outside your own school or group.

This is an invaluable tool for Corporate entities and Governors as, for the first time, it allows the setting of hiring risk-KPIs at school level to drive improved hiring practice and outcomes. And together we then drive the global standard of workforce risk management higher through gamification and external contextual awareness