Welcome to the House of Bishops’ Safer Recruitment and People Management Guidance. This is revised guidance from 2016 and helps fulfil the Church’s commitment to promote a safe environment and culture across all our communities for children, young people and vulnerable adults by setting out safer recruitment/management processes and ensuring continued vigilance once someone is in role. This Guidance came into effect on the 4th January 2022.
It goes beyond simply obtaining a Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) Certificate. The reality is that many people who have abused or will abuse in positions of trust do not have a criminal record.
This revised guidance is separated into three sections.
The first is the Requirements. These are the Must Dos - the minimum standards that everyone must adhere to.
The second is the Good Practice Advice - information on “why” the Requirements must be met, and “how” to meet them to a good level.
Finally there is the toolkit - templates and resources which can be used if there are none already in place.
The guidance is laid out so that all these three sections relating to any topic are on the same page, so you don’t have to scroll through the whole document every time.
FOR EXAMPLE if you want to search for, say, application forms, on that page, you will find what the requirements and good practice advice is for application forms, along with any templates.
There is also an FAQ document. This is a live document and is added to as questions are asked.
There is one new requirement in this guidance, and that is for DBS checks to be done at three yearly intervals rather than five. This brings the Church into line with other bodies. A 2-year period has been allowed for bodies to ensure all DBS re-checks are brought into line with this new requirement and should be complete by January 2024”.
There are no other requirement changes from the previous 2016 policy.
If you have any queries or comments on this policy, please contact clare.worrell@churchofengland.org or Deborah.mcgovern@churchofengland.org .
