AIBU to think that 6 months for Ofsted registration is ridiculous

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My nanny applied for voluntary Ofsted registration in January. She is still waiting for her Enhanced CRB check to come back. Ofsted can't help and CRB claim that it's with the police and that they can't do anything to speed it up other than place an urgent request. They won't even tell her what police are causing the delay. This is costing us almost 200 pcm as we can't use the childcare vouchers that our employers provide.

Why it seems like the govt don't want us to use these vouchers that reduce how much revenue they get from us poor saps who are PAYE!!!!!!

CRB checks can sometimes take a very long time to come through - has your nanny had a lot of previous addresses or lived abroad for part of the time? They have to check against each address, so with lots of different places that's lots of different police forces to hear back from and more chance of delays. And if you've lived abroad that gets even more complicated!

We can but hope that one day it's all consolidated onto a computer system somewhere and you can just asked one department to run a search and bing - results in five minutes. The trouble is someone would probably then lose all the data or give passwords out and then there'd be trouble!

She used to live in the states but thats going back 15 years. How many years of addresses do they check?

They check the past 5 years of addresses usually.

Vouchers can often be valid for a year, so you could stockpile them for a while, then use several in one go to pay your nanny once registration does come through. However some schemes won't issue vouchers without a carer registration number in which case you won't be able to get the vouchers.

New system for childcarer background checking starts in October, though when nannies will be part of that new system isn't clear. That new system will still use CRB checks, so there will still be initial delay... though once checked, the info will be constantly updated.

YANBU 6 months is a bit long, though you do say that Ofsted has been chased and the delay is with the CRB. Alas only thing to do is to keep chasing the CRB.