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Employers Must Be Told About A Criminal Record
by Stephen Pollard
In a field in which excuses for poor performance remain the norm, it's long been a beacon of excellence and a champion for parents.
So when it speaks its ideas deserve to be taken seriously. Its most well known director, Sir Chris Woodhead in the Nineties, stood up for academic rigour and was a rarity in education in his willingness to call a useless spade a useless spade.
The current chief inspector of schools Sir Michael Wilshaw is another man who refuses to accept educational failure. But even the most sensible and worthwhile organisation gets it wrong sometimes.
And boy has it got it wrong this week. In a national contest to find the daftest idea possible it would be difficult to think of a more daft winner than the idea put forward on Thursday by Matthew Coffey, Ofsted's national director for further education and skills.
Speaking in Wormwood Scrubs prison, Mr Coffey said that ex-prisoners should not always have to reveal their convictions to employers, even before their conviction is spent, so they would stand a better chance of getting a job.
Ministers, he said, should scrap the "one size fits all" approach to convictions because it acts as a "clear barrier to employment".
THE Rehabilitation of Offenders Act stipulates now that a prisoner who has been given a sentence of up to six months has to declare it to any prospective employer for seven years after his or her release. A sentence of more than two-and-a-half years has to be declared for life.
Mr Coffey believes that's wrong. No matter how long a sentence has been handed down for theft, assault or fraud - or any crime - he says that judges should have full discretion to be able to let prisoners keep their convictions secret after they've been let out. And that's not all.
If they've done English and maths courses while serving their time then they should be able to get away with even less time afterwards during which they have to reveal their conviction when applying for a job. "This would remove or at least lower the clear barrier to employment that nearly every ex-offender faces." But it would do so by putting the rest of us into an Alice In Wonderland world where reality is hidden from view.
If it wasn't so appalling a piece of nonsense it would be amusing to see yet more mollycoddling of prisoners and more ignoring of the needs of the rest of us. It's bad enough that prison sentences don't even mean anything in terms of time actually served.
Life is a meaningless description of a sentence that rarely is anything of the sort. Of the near 13,000 life prisoners only 47 actually have "whole life" sentences when they are expected to remain inside for the rest of their days.
For the others sentenced to "life", it can mean just a few years.
But if that wasn't enough of a bad joke this latest push is intended to find a way to hide even the fact there was any prison sentence at all, however small a fraction of it the convict served.
Barely a week goes by without the news that some murderer or thug has been set free after serving a fraction of the sentence they were given
To most it seems that the criminal justice system cares more about making life easier for convicts than it does about protecting the rest of us. The authorities bend over backwards to help them.
And now Mr Coffey is arguing that they should not even have to tell a prospective employer about their conviction and maths lessons while inside.
How can people can come up with this madness? It surely needs just some basic common sense to realise why the idea is so wrong-headed.
Most people - although clearly not Ofsted's national director for further education and skills - indeed have a good dollop of common sense.
And so most people I'm sure can see straight away that a criminal record is pretty fundamental information that an employer should have.
If I'm trying to hire an accountant who has access to all my figures and bank details the very last person I will probably want to employ is an accountant who has just done time for fraud.
I say "probably" because it may be that I decide that a candidate is indeed the right person for the job and I am happy, for whatever reason, to ignore his fraud conviction.
BUT that should be my choice based on accurate information. It shouldn't be hidden from me because of some misguided attempt to improve the job market for ex-cons.
A sensible minister such as Chris Grayling will doubtless give this bonkers idea short shrift. But here's the worry: it will not end there.
It was low-life killer John Hirst who took the government to the European Court for Human Rights over its refusal to give prisoners the vote.
And it's easy to imagine what comes next: an ex-con arguing that the demand that his record is declared to an employer is a breach of his human rights. Government might think it mad. You and I might think it mad. Almost everyone might think it mad.
But the ECHR judges might not. And we know who rules us now, don't we?
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