Dear All
Following the email dialogue about vetting - a word of caution. Vetting
alone is not enough. Some time ago I wanted to find out more about how to
ensure that only suitable individuals were recruited to work with children
and vulnerable groups. I did quite a lot of reading round the subject and
spoke to the Home Office too. The information that I gleaned was published
in GEM News, No78 Summer 2000. Since I wrote the article the arrangements
for checking have changed a bit, although I have not had time to check the
details.
It is worth remembering that vetting is only one of a range of strategies
that we should use to weed out inappropriate employees (or volunteers). The
advice that I was given was that recruitement, training and monitoring of
staff play an essential role. The Home Office site has a code of practice
online at www.homeoffice.gov.uk/acu/harm.htm Also, the National Centre for
Volunteering (www.volunteering.org.uk) has lots of useful information on
all aspects of working with volunteers. I see that they have a new
publication 'Safe & Alert: Good practice advice on volunteers working with
vulnerable clients' Seems good value at £10. They did have a good online
information sheet on screening but in a rushed search just now and I
couldn.t find it.
Hope that is of some help.
Tina Sawyer
Museum Education Consultant
----- Original Message -----
From: "Emmie Kell" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2002 4:07 PM
Subject: police checking
> Dear All,
>
> Sorry if this has been asked already recently but a number of people
> mentioned it at the GEM conference. I'd really like to know what other
> people do about police checking (or not) freelance staff who work on
family
> or school activities. Am I right in thinking that it is mainly local
> authority museums or civil service that already have their own procedures
> set up that do the checks? Does anyone from an independent museum do it?
> Also does anybody check outside agencies (ie storytellers, performers etc)
> to see if people have their own public liability insurance?
>
> Am I the only one that is confused?!
>
> Emmie Kell
> Public Programmes Co-ordinator
> Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester
> tel. 0161 606 0151
> www.msim.org.uk
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