Checks not complete at Soham's schools

Three staff at Holly Wells' and Jessica Chapman's old school have still not had their backgrounds checked for any criminal convictions eight days before the girls' classmates return for the new term.

The murders of the two 10-year-olds and the subsequent arrests of their former teaching assistant and the caretaker of the next-door secondary school has highlighted the drastic backlog of checks by the Government's new Criminal Records Bureau (CRB).

The Department of Education has insisted no staff can start work until vetting has been completed, and headteachers have spoken of an "emergency" with 12,000 staff awaiting clearance.

Schools are preparing to send thousands of pupils home when term starts this week as a result of the backlog. Local Education Authorities said yesterday that they were braced for a staffing crisis thanks to the continuing delays at the CRB – a new Home Office agency set up to ensure that adults who work with children do not have records of sex abuse or violence.

The bureau had promised to process outstanding applications by Wednesday, when most schools re-open, but this now looks unlikely.

Graham Lane, chair of the education executive on the Local Government Association, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the CRB had been "complacent" and had failed to recruit sufficient staff in the summer.

The shortage has been exacerbated by ministers' response to the deaths of the Soham schoolgirls. They are now insisting that all new staff must be fully, rather than partially, checked before they start work, leaving thousands of classes without a teacher.

Last week Cambridgeshire Education Authority was forced to admit that 100 of its own teachers were still waiting to be screened, including a "handful" at Soham Village College where Ian Huntley worked as a caretaker.

Two teachers and a general assistant at St Andrew's Primary School, where Maxine Carr worked with the two girls, are also waiting to be checked.

Last week five schools in Leicestershire, which started early, found they had to send more than 800 children home, while schools in the City of Leicester started a day late. Speaking yesterday, Malcolm Trobe, head of Malmesbury School in Wiltshire said that none of his 15 new teachers had been approved by the CRB so far.

A spokesman for the CRB apologised for the delays. "We can't afford to get it wrong. We have to balance speed and accuracy," he said. "No one would forgive us if we got it wrong. We have found out that what we've undertaken is more labour intensive than we'd expected. We aim to turn round these checks in three weeks. At the moment it's taking six. It's not as good as it should be and I apologise for that."

Both Mr Huntley and Ms Carr were vetted and cleared under the old system, though he was using the name Nixon.

Yesterday, it emerged that some parents from Soham have already asked about transferring their children elsewhere though no formal requests have yet been made.

Cambridgeshire experts – taking advice from the Trauma Clinic in London – will be offering counselling to staff and pupils but it will fall predominantly to the teachers to identify any youngsters who may require more help.