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Ever since the Covid 19 pandemic hit the UK at the start of 2020, a vaccine has been seen as the way out of repeated lockdowns and social distancing. Now we have three vaccines approved, with the first patients receiving doses in December 2020. Plans to vaccinate all people over the age of 50, along with those classed as clinically vulnerable require a huge number of people to administer the vaccines. But this recruitment process hasn’t gone smoothly, with medical staff reporting a huge bureaucratic nightmare in registering as a potential vaccinator.

Although most students didn’t return to schools in the UK after the Christmas break, plans are being made to get as many students back into classrooms as quickly as possible. One of the strategies being considered is vaccinating teachers and other school staff. In addition, there are calls for teams of volunteers to go into secondary schools across England and set up a programme of testing for students. This would involve administering quick-response lateral flow tests to children, and then following the right protocols for anyone who tests positive. Concern has been raised about the fact that these volunteers won’t be DBS checked, but is this legal?

If you are asked for a background check or a potential employee does a check through the DBS, then it is likely you will have a few questions concerning this procedure.

CRB checks are often an integral part of an employer or organisation’s safeguarding process to help them make safer recruitment and licensing decisions. These are also known as DBS checks because they are carried out by the Disclosure and Barring Service, which comes under the Home Office umbrella.

How confidential is the information that appears in all levels of Disclosure and Barring Service’s (DBS) checks?

In response to the increased demand for frontline healthcare workers in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic that’s swept the UK, the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) is now providing standard and enhanced CRB checks free-of-charge.

Scams are nothing new. Scammers however have to be constantly one step ahead of the game and come up with new ways of parting people from their money. One of the most recent scams is around fleecing prospective job candidates, asking them to apply for a DBS Check which just doesn’t exist.

Every business goes about hiring in a different way, with their own checks and balances to ensure that they are getting the right workers. There is however increasing evidence that a slap-dash approach to recruitment could be damaging to your business in the long run. There’s an obvious balance to be struck between spending a fortune on checking everything, and not doing any checks at all. Here’s our ultimate guide to getting it right for your organisation, and protecting staff, customers and your profits too.

Recruitment will undergo a huge change in the UK after the Brexit process has been completed at the end of 2020. Employers who have traditionally recruited from other parts of the European Union with no red-tape, will suddenly find themselves unable to get staff as easily as they have in the past. For this reason, business support organisations are urging companies to take action now to see whether they qualify under Licensed Sponsor status.

Over the past months since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, a whole Army of unpaid volunteers have stepped up to help their local communities in a multitude of different ways. Most of the volunteers help the NHS, but recent calls from the Children’s Commissioner for England has led calls for a similar scheme to support social care, in order to stop some of the country’s most vulnerable children from falling through the gaps.