Sex offenders in schools: old news

Scandals have anniversaries, too, and another has just passed. In January 2006, it emerged that the Education Department (DfES) had authorised Paul Reeve — a man who had a police caution for viewing child pornography and was on the Sex Offenders Register — to be employed as a PE teacher in a school in Norwich.

In May 2005, civil servants advised Kim Howells, an education minister at the time, that the man should be given only a warning, was not a risk to children, had not been convicted of an offence and that no child had been harmed. Reeve had not been put on what is still called ‘List 99’, the department’s blacklist, even though he was on the Sex Offenders Register. More cases were quickly uncovered.

At the heart of the scandal was the government’s astonishing failure to act quickly and with political will upon the recommendations of Sir Michael Bichard. His inquiry, published in June 2004, investigated the murder by Ian Huntley of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham two years earlier. Sir Michael recommended a new ‘central register’ that unified all the lists of those who could be a danger to children. He also suggested that an independent body, rather than politicians, should decide who should be barred from working in schools.

Last November, the government finally passed the 2006 Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act in response to Bichard. But — to parents alarmed by almost daily headlines about sex offenders on the loose — only one question matters: three years on from the Bichard report, are the promised independent body and unified list up and running, or not?

I call the Education Department press office. When is the Independent Barring Board (IBB) expected to start? Answer: an independent panel led by Sir Roger Singleton, the former head of Barnardo’s, currently advises on every barring decision.