Managing Your School’s Single Central Record

This month, Nigel Milligan explores the evolution of single central record (SCR) management in schools, highlighting common challenges and offering practical solutions

For many years, schools have used a variety of tools to produce their single central record. Probably the most popular option is a spreadsheet which, in its simplest form, is useful and if shared collaboratively with key members of the safeguarding team has been easy to keep in one place so everyone sees the same version. More recently I have been asked frequently by various schools about making a change to a more efficient way of managing this. Throughout the rest of this article, I will refer to the record as SCR.

Before we continue in more depth, here’s a few questions about the SCR:

• How do you manage the SCR?
• Where is the SCR stored?
• Who has access to the SCR and has the responsibility to update it?
• How do you know which members of the SCR are compliant and which areas need to be updated?
• How much focus do you place on the SCR being up to date and is this audited at regular intervals by the governing body and safeguarding team?

The SCR itself is a relatively simple record of personal details with additional fields of information in relation to the professional and legal documents of evidence pertaining to each qualifying member of the school workforce. The main challenge with the SCR is identifying gaps in the record and when key renewal dates are due or have expired. The spreadsheet solution is a great way to gather and store the information and evidence, however without more complex formulas the task of checking for compliance is more of a manual task which usually involves having to set separate reminders in diaries etc.

How Can This be Improved?

Over the past few years many existing systems that schools already use have developed additional add-on SCR options so that all your MIS and SCR information is in one ‘central’ place and offers a much clearer and compliant way of doing things.

Many options work with the integrated MIS and visitor management systems to give access to everything you need in one central location. The best thing to do is evaluate a selection of options and choose the one which fits in the best with your existing School MIS or other systems.

Whilst I have been evaluating various options and speaking to some of the providers, it’s been interesting to hear some of the examples of SCR that some schools have had in place and were reliant on one long standing member of staff to maintain this. Unbelievable examples of paper based handwritten records that all relied on manually checking through renewal dates. I hope my summary has helped to give you an idea of what your school can do.