Official guidance aims to minimise the number of checks being sought

The head of the village college which employed child killer Ian Huntley as a caretaker, Howard Gilbert, has called for a better system of checks.

His concerns have wider echoes. The National Association of Head Teachers said it was clear the current system of vetting school staff needed "a radical overhaul".

Support staff should be treated in the same way as teaching staff and be the subject of higher level - so-called "enhanced" - disclosure of information.

'Extreme urgency'

"The current practice of allowing each individual police force to decide what information, beyond a criminal conviction, should be disclosed must be brought to an end," said the general secretary, David Hart.

"It is a lottery that throws up totally different sets of information, depending entirely upon the discretion of the chief constable.

"This must be dealt with as a matter of extreme urgency because heads must not be misled, however inadvertently, into employing staff who are a danger to children."

The "enhanced" disclosures show spent and unspent convictions and cautions, and police may also provide details of acquittals or other "non-conviction information" they hold.

In Ian Huntley's case, Humberside police either failed to do this or had deleted the relevant records.

Incomplete

But there is no guarantee that even a criminal record will show up.

As BBC News revealed on Thursday, many police forces are still failing to enter details of convictions and arrests into the Police National Computer within the required time limit, according to a confidential report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary.

This has been a long-standing problem. The report says: "There is the potential for known offenders or those suspected of serious offending to be overlooked during the Criminal Review Bureau checks."

But even if the information were timely it could still be incomplete.

The police "national" computer serves England and Wales and also holds "most relevant convictions in Scotland", according to the CRB.

It says "plans are being made" to include criminal convictions from Northern Ireland, but at present these might not turn up in people's disclosures.

Judgements

As for staff who have come to the UK from overseas, the official view is that there is not even any point seeking a disclosure because they will not be on record in this country.

Checks can be made with some overseas police forces to get a "good conduct" certificate, but the picture is very patchy.

Even in the Republic of Ireland, for example, there are no child protection arrangements for checking people's criminal backgrounds.

The general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, John Dunford, said: "Heads must never again be placed in the position in which the Soham Village College head teacher has found himself."

He said: "Heads have to make judgements on information received from the Criminal Records Bureau and this needs to be as full as possible."

But he cautioned that the paramount interest - protection of children - had to be balanced against the possibility that an applicant for a job may have been falsely or maliciously accused.

"This is a very difficult balance and secondary heads will support an inquiry to resolve this dilemma."

The problem of false accusations against staff is a long-standing concern of teachers' associations - presenting an obvious difficulty in the case of someone like Ian Huntley, who had only unsubstantiated allegations against him.

Overload

The most recent guidance from the Department for Education and Skills - issued a year ago - was concerned primarily with limiting the requests for disclosures because the system was being swamped. It was called "managing the demand for disclosures".

It says for example that some people had been seeking repeat disclosures on prospective employees who were changing jobs.

So the advice was not to bother unless there had been an employment break of more than three months.

The guidance stresses the test of "posts which regularly involve caring for, training, supervising or being in sole charge of young people".

A spokesperson said: "We take the view that caretakers are likely to fall into this category and so will qualify for an enhanced disclosure."