Time to sort out the mess of teacher disclosure forms

AMID the hand-wringing and protestation over "slashing cuts to front-line public services" it is easy to forget that the new era of public finance austerity should act as a catalyst for long overdue and much needed reform of inefficient and wasteful procedures in the government and local authority sectors.

Such reform is welcome, not only for taxpayers but for many working within the public services frustrated by needless bureaucratic procedure and protocol. In this new era, such inefficiencies lock vitally needed resources that can be better used elsewhere and can only persist at the cost of someone else's job.

A classic case in point is the cumbersome procedure faced by Scottish teachers today in applying for a teaching post. All teachers must already go through a process of registration in order to be allowed to work in a school and set out on their careers. The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) insists on the checks before allowing anyone into the classroom. That is as it should be.

But in addition, local authorities are insisting that all teachers applying for education fill out further lengthy disclosure forms. Some will be charging applicants about 50 each time they apply for a position.

In the current conditions of teacher surfeit and job shortage, positions can attract hundreds of applications. Some councils in the Central Belt claim to have received 200 applications per teaching job. East Renfrewshire claims up to 300.

Councils, desperate to find ways to cut costs, have resorted to imposing charges. For young applicants who have just come just out of university and are applying for jobs in several local authority areas, this can make job hunting a prohibitively expensive undertaking as well as bureaucratically cumbersome. Little wonder that in some cases by the time the teacher has gone through the application and disclosure process and has become eligible to apply, the job has gone.

This system of double disclosure is unnecessary, cumbersome, bureaucratic, inefficient, time wasting and frustrating to all involved. Local authorities incur needless cost and applicants face duplicate charges — and delay frustrates the school. It is a classic example of non-joined-up thinking that can surely be remedied by a more efficiently run central information clearing system. It should not be necessary for applicant teachers to be asked to supply the same information separately to different local authorities and then to be charged for each new application. This simply makes no sense.

Here there is at least a flickering sign of encouragement.

The Scottish Government recognises the burden and bureaucracy associated with the dysfunctional system of multiple disclosure checks and has pledged to take action.

A spokeswoman says that the new Protection for Vulnerable Groups (PVG) Scheme should do away with the need for multiple checks, but there is some doubt as to whether this is really addressing the problem at hand. z