Safeguarding, DBS and site access
A contractor working on a school site during term time needs checks, identification, sign-in and escorting, and a school is right to ask for all four in writing.
ADI’s published engineer requirements provide the source for this DBS wording.
What a school should ask any contractor
- What DBS checks do the attending engineers hold, and at what level?
- Can you send a safeguarding policy, and who is your safeguarding lead?
- Will the same engineer attend throughout, so we are not inducting a stranger each visit?
- Will they carry photographic identification, and will they wait to be signed in?
- What is your position on lone working near pupils?
Ask them of us and of anyone else quoting. A contractor who treats those questions as an inconvenience has told you something useful.
How the checks actually work
The Disclosure and Barring Service issues three levels of check. A Basic check shows unspent convictions. A Standard check shows spent and unspent convictions, cautions, reprimands and warnings. An Enhanced check adds any information a police force considers relevant, and, where the role is eligible, a check against the barred lists.
Which level applies to a visiting contractor depends on whether the work is regulated activity, and that turns on frequency and on whether the person is unsupervised with children. A contractor attending occasionally and escorted throughout is in a different position from one working unsupervised in a school every week. The school's own policy, written against Keeping children safe in education, decides what it requires.
What good site practice looks like
- Arrive at reception, sign in, wear the visitor badge the school issues, and hand it back.
- Be escorted in occupied areas, and stay out of teaching spaces during lessons unless the school arranges otherwise.
- No photography of anything that could include a pupil. Survey photographs are of pipework, plant and floors.
- Park where the school says, not where it is convenient.
- Tell the office before opening a chamber, a manhole or anything a child could fall into, and never leave one unattended.
Early years and special schools
Both settings apply tighter controls, and both are right to. In a nursery an engineer cannot avoid being near children in the way they can on a secondary site. In a special school, many pupils cannot report a concern in the way a mainstream pupil could. Expect escorting throughout, expect work to be pushed outside session hours, and expect the setting to want to know exactly who is attending in advance.
Leak detection in nurseries and early years settings and in special schools and SEND settings cover the practical differences.