childminding application dbs

[rararachel1990]

Im trying to become a childminder but my dbs is giving me awful anxiety. I have a few small convictions from my teens that was over 10/15 years ago (criminal damage, shop lifting and theft) im worried i have came all this way with my training and Ofsted will straight up reject me :(

You won’t know until you try. Some old, spent convictions still show up, but as long as you’re not a danger to children you will be considered.

I have common assault on mine (from when I was 23 - around 10 years ago now and I've been accepted as a social worker and previous to that I was a nanny / childminder / worked in nurseries.

Be open and honest on the form about any convictions - also they may have been filtered off by now anyway

What were the actual convictions, did you get a prison sentence (suspended or otherwise), exactly how old were you when you committed the offence.

it probably would have been a good idea to check before doing all the training.

The only automatic bars are certain violent and sexual offences - or other things like being entered on the DBS barred from working with children list, having children removed from your care by a legal order, that sort of level. Minor offences and things like theft are not an automatic no to working in childcare. If they show up on your DBS check then it would be noted for something Ofsted would want to talk to you about, in the same way as if you have declared you have a health issue. They would want to be reassured that you are still a 'suitable person' to look after small children unsupervised, so have you acknowledged and learnt from the convictions, were there mitigating circumstances, what would you do now if the same sort of situation occurred. So if it was a case of you had difficult family circumstances at the time, you fell in with the wrong crowd, got caught up in a bad situation, it was a one-off, you admitted it to the police at the time and apologised to the people you impacted, now you're older and wiser, you've got a family, you haven't been in any trouble for ten years, you volunteer at XYZ and have good references from several places, it's all likely to be fine.