Woman's Hour - Rachel Clarke, DBS Checks, Home Schooling

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

Rachel Clarke is a doctor working at a hospice. She’s a palliative care doctor and says the “currency of a hospice is kindness”. She's talking about sweet and thoughtful gestures that make a difference to dying patients and their loved ones. She’s also a great believer in talking to patients and relatives about how death comes, and says the reality of it is normally not as awful as we fear. Sixty thousand children stay at home for their education and do very well. They're taught by dedicated mums and dads. However, there are fresh concerns about home schooling due to a couple in Northamptonshire who are now in jail for child cruelty. They told their son's school that they wanted to teach him at home but he suffered four years of abuse. There's been a Serious Case Review into what happened and it concluded that home-schooling regulations in England and Wales need ‘urgent care’. We discuss with the Children's Commissioner, Anne Longfield. Do you have a criminal record for a relatively minor offence from years ago. Is it stopping you doing the jobs you'd like to do, like being a nurse, caring for children or working in a library? Two legal charities have launched a campaign called #FairChecks. They want the government to reform the way people have to disclose criminal records. Jenni talks to two women who've had DBS problems and to Rachel Tynan, from the charity Unlock.Georgie Codd, author of We Swim to the Shark, is really really scared of fish. She suffers from ichthyphobia – a fear of fish. She joins Jenni to talk about the drastic steps she took to overcome her phobia.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for the 31st of January, and that's a Friday. Good morning. In today's programme, the woman whose name is Cod, who suffered from ichthyophobia, a fear of fish. Why did swimming with a huge whale shark cure her? Calls for reform of the DBS system, disclosure of criminal records, should a minor crime committed as a teenager prevent an adult from getting a job? And as a child's parents are jailed for extreme cruelty, what will be the effect on the some 60,000 children who are homeschooled?

The abused child had been hidden out of sight on the pretext of being taught at home. Now, Rachel Clarke's father was a doctor. As she grew up, she decided journalism was for her. But eventually, after making documentaries for television, she changed her mind and went back to university to study medicine. She's the author of Your Life in My Hands, a junior doctor's story. But she's now moved into the kind of medicine she describes as the Dowdy Support Act of the profession. She practices palliative care at a hospice in Oxfordshire, and she's published another book, Dear Life. Rachel, why that description, the Dowdy Support Act of medicine? Well, there are certainly rock stars in the medical firmament and the rock stars are specialisms like brain surgery, cardiothoracic

surgery. They tend to be very male dominated. And they're the sort of exciting when you discover what someone does at a dinner party specialty. When someone finds out at a party that you do palliative medicine, they tend to flinch a little bit and grimace and say something like, gosh, that must be ever so depressing. And actually, even some doctors have that attitude. They're a little bit nervous around the subject of death and dying. So it's emphatically not a glamorous medical specialty. But if you believe medicine is about not glamour, not status, not power, but about helping people, then it's second to none.

So what made you choose it as your speciality? So I came into medicine late in life with a very clear ambition, a very simple ambition. I wanted to train in such a way that I could help people who are vulnerable, and all patients are vulnerable. But of course, some groups are particularly vulnerable. They don't have a voice. They may be people with mental illness or disabled people, the very elderly. And dying people are one such group.

They do not tend to attract celebrity endorsements. They can't speak out. They're too exhausted. And actually, sometimes they can be terribly neglected in a mainstream medical setting, and they might languish in a corner, forgotten about an award. And I couldn't think of anything more valuable than trying to help those particularly vulnerable patients. Now, you open the book with a description of taking your father to a prom concert when he was terminally ill with bowel cancer. Why is that story so significant to your attitude to coming towards death?

So, Dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer just over a year before he died, and his final summer was an achingly painful summer where we knew his life was running out. He had stopped chemotherapy. He knew he had a few months at most. And we desperately wanted to try to give his remaining time as much meaning and fulfilment as possible. So I took him to this prom, the first prom I'd ever been to in my life, because dad, when he was a medical student, used to buy the cheap tickets and stand up in the rafters and listen to music. And the prom was an Elgar prom conducted by Daniel Barenboim. And it was also at the height of a lot of the Brexit excitement and drama.

And Daniel Barenboim, a German conductor conducting a German orchestra, turned to us at the end and talked about how music connected us, how it brought us together. And he said, now I'm going to show you how. And he played Elgar's very famous piece of music, Nimrod, which happened to be my father's favourite piece of music. And it felt like a gift that had been handed unwittingly by a conductor to the man in the box right of stage who was dying and it was the most extraordinary experience and dad exalted in it it was wonderful you had what you describe as your own brush with cervical cancer what did you learn from that experience obviously it was not a positive negative result yes yeah you didn't have

it no I didn't but when I was a medical student ironically on my gynecology attachment I had a routine smear test assumed it would come back as normal and got a phone call from my GP saying actually you need to have more investigations. And I thought it would be slightly abnormal. And in fact, it was a severely abnormal smear, the kind where you can't tell if it's cancer or not until you actually have a biopsy. All of a sudden, I confronted the fact that I might have cervical cancer, I might have an illness that could kill me. I had to go through some quite unpleasant procedures to establish what was going on, involving all the difficult things, legs in stirrups, feeling horribly exposed as a woman. And I learned how utterly powerless and overwhelmed you feel as a patient and I took

that experience into my practice as a doctor and I vowed never ever to forget what it's like for patients. What do you see as the aim of the hospice environment because that's where you work now. So most of medicine is very ruthlessly about cure and saving lives. You don't learn about death and dying at all really at medical school. You learn about essentially diseased body parts and how to fix them and that means you come out into your life as a doctor, not necessarily thinking about patients as human beings with life stories and meanings and emotions. Palliative medicine is all about putting the patient as a human being first. We don't mind what body part is diseased. What we care about is the human being in front of us whose time is short, is limited by their disease. What matters to them and what can we do to enable you

to live what remains of your life as richly and fully as possible on your own terms? And we will move heaven and earth to try and achieve an environment and maybe help enable the patient to experience things that matter to them at the end of life because that may not tick a box on a medical rubric but it's everything that matters when you are losing everything and everyone you love in this world. Hospices are notoriously underfunded. How do you cope with that? You're absolutely right. So my hospice, as an example, is a small

rural hospice called Catherine House in Oxfordshire. And we need £4 million a year to provide this incredibly precious service, priceless service for people in the community who are dying. And we only get less than a quarter of that from the government, from the NHS. So we have to raise £3.5 million a year. And if we can't do that, then patients may suffer. And I don't think there is any other part of the NHS that has that funding model. Imagine knowing that you may not get a maternity bed to have your baby because the jumble sales didn't raise enough money that week. It is so precarious and so heartbreaking and the

community does a wonderful job of raising that money but it's not enough. The NHS is meant to be a cradle to grave service and I don't believe there is any metric in a civilised society that is more important as a measure of humanity than the care with which we treat each other as we are dying. You've been a relative, supporting and advocating for somebody you love. How difficult is it for doctors and nurses who are under pressure, paying attention to patients, to pay equal attention to anxious relatives who are terrified they're going to lose someone they love? It is incredibly difficult because what you need to support a family as well as a patient is time.

And in an understaffed NHS, time is what everybody doesn't have and they're constantly rushing between patient and patient, family member and family member. And I am incredibly lucky to work in an environment where I have enough time to have those difficult conversations. One of the real costs of that, I think, is doctors sometimes flinch away from those difficult conversations with family members. They might not sit down and talk very clearly about the fact that this patient is sick enough to die, they're going to die. And that can create a huge amount of

distress and fear and bewilderment where families don't understand what's happening. And in a way, if the medical profession set a better example than that, it might help with a lot of the fear and taboo around the topic of death and dying. There will be people listening to this program now who are caring for someone who's dying. What would you say to help them, to help them cope with it? I think on an emotional level that the most important thing that I have learned from my experience of caring for hundreds of patients is that you don't need to worry about saying the right thing. There is no magic formula of words that makes it easier to die. What makes it easier is knowing that you have people who love you and care for you around you. And if they are only able to express that care and love in clunky, awkward, difficult

language, that's okay. The language is breaking down because the more we love someone, the more painful it is to see them die. So never worry about saying the wrong thing. Just be there and support your loved one with your presence at the bedside. That's precious. Rachel Clarke, thank you very much for being with us this morning. And I'll just repeat the title of the book is Dear Life. Thank you. Now you may have read in the newspapers yesterday about an unnamed boy

who had suffered four years of terrible abuse at the hands of his parents. He'd been effectively out of sight because the parents had said he was being schooled at home. Well they have been jailed but his experience has led to questions about the

rules surrounding homeschooling, which is thought to involve some 60,000 children in the UK. Do they need to be reviewed? Well, I'm joined by Wendy Charles-Warner, a trustee for Education Otherwise, and the Children's Commissioner, Anne Longfield. Anne, what does this Northamptonshire case demonstrate for you? Well, good morning. Once again, it demonstrates the terrible experience and dangers that can occur when children are hidden from view. In this case, as you say, kept out of sight by parents who were

keen to avoid the light of the authorities. They did so under the auspices of homeschooling that so many parents are choosing to do, but they can all elect to do, which has very loose regulation. The local authorities didn't know the child was there or didn't look for them. The NHS, which you might expect would notice

that the child wasn't attending checks, didn't do so. And the Serious Case Review concluded that there needs to be serious reform of homeschooling, something I have agreed with for some time and something that the government acted on last year with the commitment to introduce a new register for children who weren't attending school. Now, Wendy, given this case as such a terrible example,

what do you make of the idea of a national register so that at least people can keep track of children who are being schooled at home? I think, actually, that we're asking the wrong question because we're not talking about a child who was unseen, unknown or hidden. We're talking about a child who was well known to social services. The school nurse had been persistent in seeking to report the child and services could have acted.

I can quote something Anne said about Northamptonshire Children's Services. In 2019, they failed to protect the most vulnerable children and have a dysfunctional safeguarding system. Unfortunately, that becomes extrapolated and home education becomes a whipping boy for a problem which is actually a social services problem. There is a system in place for dealing with problems where you cannot find information about a child's education.

The local authority can make an inquiry. If the parent doesn't respond, the local authority can take an inquiry. If the parent doesn't respond, the local authority can take action for school attendance. If they have concerns about the welfare of the child, the matter should and ought to be referred to social services. Unfortunately, the referrals to social services in this instance simply failed. Anne, let me put this point to you what what real difference would a national register really make? We know there was only one part-time local

authority officer in Northamptonshire to keep an eye on homeschooled children an estimated thousand of them. Sure and I've been really clear that Northamptonshire have been very poor for some time and clearly there are huge concerns about how they acted here but just to tackle this issue about whether this is about homeschooling or not I've always supported the rights of parents to choose to educate their children at home. I applaud when they do it well and never focused on that. But I'm also very aware that this huge increase includes lots of parents

who haven't done this by choice. They've just ended up in this situation. And some who are actively using the loose regulation and lax regulation as a way of disappearing from you and avoiding the authorities. Now it's those children that i am

really concerned about and what councils say good or bad is that they don't know which children are being home educated in their area and having a register would enable them and help them to do that now i don't think for all of those parents that clearly have huge concern around their family's future and are absolutely investing their time and energy into homeschooling as a result of that. I don't think it's too much to ask or too big a burden to have a register. I think it's sensible and I think it will help. Wendy, there is evidence that the numbers are going up and perhaps some of them are going up because of school exclusion, so the parents are not choosing to school their children at home. Surely that adds to the need for keeping track of those children.

Actually, in order to have some intervention with people's lives, you need to have a rationale behind it. And actually, recently, the numbers have been dropping because action has been taken on off-rolling. And off-rolling is what Anne's talking about. In practice... What do you mean by off-rolling? Off-rolling, apologies, I should have explained. Off-rolling is when rather than choosing to home educate, a parent is pressured into doing so by the school in order to prevent any reflection of bad performance or attendance on the school register.

So the same as exclusion, really? It's the parent is coerced into taking the child out of school. But Anne made a point that these children need to be seen and known about, but any child who is removed from school is known about. The local authority has a legal obligation to notify the local authority about that child. So parents cannot remove a child from school and hide that child if everybody involved acts according to the regulations. So, Anne, if the child has been removed or excluded, they're known about. They're not hidden.

There are two things here. One is that if a family moves areas between local authority areas that new council won't know it's only at the point where the child leaves the school and there'll be some children who will never have been to school um and the other is that families don't have to let the agencies in if they ask to visit and we know from research last year that nearly a third of families don't i mean i think this is something which is just a sensible step forward which would help councils who um you know we would hope would be uh fulfilling their responsibilities but we know also that they're saying themselves they need help.

And it would also really ensure that those children had others who were able to see them, we could be sure that they were safe and also getting the education that they need. I've got to say this is very light touch compared to some countries. In Jersey, parents have to apply every year and they're actually assessed in terms of education. So I don't think government's gone over the top on this at all and they are proposing that they'll also offer to support and pay for exams I think for children who are homeschooled so I do think there is the possibility of additional support for those families who need it. Wendy given that we know a lot of the parents who do this do it by choice and are

doing a very good job, why are they so scared of being registered? There are several aspects to it and can I first of all make a point here? Well, just answer that question. Why are they so scared? Right. There are several aspects to it. What parents report to me is, firstly, they don't want the stigma. Their children are already stigmatised by negative media reports and the whole concept that is put across that they are abused children, but there is this stigma. Parents are deeply distressed by the stigmatisation that being required to register would cause for them. There's also another point that they raise is the thin end of the wedge argument. Currently, on the last occasion we assessed it, almost all, bar maybe a dozen, local authorities of the 152 in England were not compliant with the legislation and guidance. Almost all local authorities do not currently comply. So the argument on parents' behalf is, if we give them further powers, that will end in further non-compliance.

Anne, just one final point on this. Why increase the stigma? I don't think it does increase the stigma. I think actually arguing against regulation in this way raises concerns about why that would be. I think everyone would want children to be safe and educated, and there are a very small few who are using the banner of home education quite wrongly to actually disappear from view. And if it saves a very small number of children from terrible experiences, I would hope everyone would think it was worth it. Anne Longfield and Wendy Charles-Warner, thank you both very much indeed for being with us.

And we would like to hear from you on this. If you are homeschooling or would like to homeschool or you have to homeschool, what do you think about whether everyone should be registered? Every child registered with the local authority. You can send us a tweet or of course you can always send us an email. Now still to come in today's programme, the two charities urging reform of the DBS system, Disclosure of Criminal Records. Should minor and often very old crimes prevent an adult from getting a job? And the serial, the final episode of Jackie Kay's Trumpet. Now, it's not often you meet someone with as appropriate a name as Georgie Codd.

But here she is, the woman who suffered from her teenage from a condition known as ichthyophobia, a fear of fish. In her late 20s, she decided to face her fear in the most dramatic fashion possible. She took herself to Thailand to learn how to dive with the intention of eventually swimming alongside a whale shark, the biggest fish in the sea. Her book is called We Swim to the Shark. Georgie, how did your fear of fish manifest itself?

In quite a slow and surprising way, actually. It didn't happen suddenly. I watched Jaws too many times. That didn't help. And then I got bitten by fish in the sea, which lots of people have been surprised at. But sometimes they do bite you. Where were you when you were bitten? Once in Mallorca on holiday with my mum. And the best

thing about it was that I shrieked and said, oh my goodness, I've just been bitten. And my mum said, no, you haven't. You have not. And it immediately bit her. So, you know. What kind of fish was it? I never saw it. It sounds like a barracuda it was probably about an inch long and it disappeared and I never saw it again but those yeah little things like that started making me feel afraid of them and then I went on a snorkeling trip with my mum in Australia which is supposed to be a trip of a lifetime and it was an amazing holiday um but when it got to the point of being in the water with the fish, I was surrounded and I had a panic attack. And I realised then, I can't do this. I can't,

they scare me too much. I have to get out of the water. So why did you decide you had to deal with it and not was to use CBT cognitive behavioral therapy in conjunction with some other things to help her deal with her fear of spiders and it was things like she was encouraged to get a little bit closer to the spider every time and and I thought that sounds that sounds like something I could do and at the time I was having a very I was stuck in a rut really and I really wanted an adventure I was 28 I felt like my life should have purpose and it definitely didn't so I thought I'd invent a purpose and try and swim with the biggest fish in the world now you did swim with dolphins

in new zealand which is something most people absolutely love to do you hated it why picture the scene you're on your own kind of well not quite on on your own i had well that was dolphins i thought i i OK, I'm in this place. It's going to be amazing. Everyone talks about how amazing it is. And I need to get over this fear. So let's start. Let's see what I can do.

So I started walking into the shallows and then got deeper and deeper and then got out of my depth. And I was in this vast amount of grey water. Couldn't see through it. And then this black fin just popped up about I don't know 50 meters away and disappeared and I was like oh gosh no oh this isn't good and then I looked the other way and there was another one and then suddenly there was this really loud kind of right behind my head and I couldn't see them and it was just like a horror film to be honest I had to run out so to what extent have you managed to cure this phobia well so the

it's it's it's manageable I think it's manageable I've I spent the the course of the book it takes place over about four years so this was a long adventure quite a long quest and I I just learned tips I met so many interesting people other scuba divers um and people who'd done extraordinary things under the water terrifying things and I was just basically watching how they managed their fears because they said they're all afraid too but they were still doing it one of the things you said is it got darker the deeper in what did you mean by that oh well well I thought that this is going to be quite a straightforward task and that I'd visit Thailand and find a whale shark there and that's not what happened things got complicated it wasn't straightforward. And I met some in the process of trying to understand my own fear. And in talking to more and more scuba divers, I heard some horror stories, really.

And the book kind of opened up and the quest opened up to being not really. I mean, there's a lot of fish in it, but it was much more than that. It was about the unknown and death and the things that I think scare everybody, probably. There are frequent mentions in the book of Jacques Cousteau, the French explorer of oceans. Did you really see yourself maybe being a female Jacques Cousteau? Somebody's got to do it, right? I hoped it could be me and hey maybe it still can be me but I think there's definitely room for a Jackie Cousteau out there where there's

there's not that many well there are actually loads of women divers but proportionately men definitely tip the scales and we the the women need to get out there they need to get on their boats and come on that's what I wanted, a nice big boat full of ladies, all scuba diving and getting in with the fish conquering the oceans, yeah Are you really called Cod? I'm afraid to say it, it is definitely true

the rumours are correct I did suspect you might have made it up but I'm very pleased you haven't Georgie Cod, thank you very much indeed for being with us. And the book of Gordie's We Swim to the Shark. Thank you very much. Now, they used to be known as CRB checks, Criminal Record Bureau. They're now DBS checks, requiring the disclosure of criminal records

for anyone applying for a job working in childcare or caring for the vulnerable or the elderly. But two charities, Unlock and Transform Justice, are calling for reform of the system. The campaign is called Hashtag Fair Checks because it's argued that a minor crime, perhaps committed as a teenager, should not prevent a mature adult from finding work. Well, Rachel Tynan is the policy and practice lead for Unlock. Emma was 17 when she was involved in a fight. She's now 29.

And Lee was involved in benefit fraud when she was 19. She's now 52. Lee, what happened to you when you were 19? Hello, Jenny. I was a student in my first year at Polytechnic and it was summer and I had a part time job in a pub. And my flatmate was going away travelling. So she asked me to take her extra shifts, which I did. I had been working about 10 hours a week and I was claiming supplementary benefit at the time. It was the summertime and I took the extra shifts and that took me over the

limit that I should have been working whilst claiming. So I think I was working about 20 hours a week. And stupidly, I continued the claim at that time. I knew that I should have finished it. So it wasn't that I was ignorant. I was just stupid, I think, and still did that. So that was over a six-week period. And then went back to college in September, and that was the end of it. So I thought, and then about a month later, there was a knock at the door, and it was a DHSS inspector

who said that somebody had reported me for wrongful claim. And I was then taken to court and prosecuted for making a wrongful claim over that period. And what was your punishment? I had three £30 fines and I paid the benefit back. I think the benefit was about £200, so that was paid back and I had three fines of £30 because I'd claimed, I'd made the false claim three times over the six-week period. It was a fortnightly claiming process. So what is actually on your

criminal record now, all these years on? My criminal record has one conviction for wrongful claim of supplementary benefit, but underneath that one conviction, it lists the three separate offences on the three different dates that I did that claim over that six weeks. And because it is therefore classed as more than one thing, it still appears 36 years after the event, 33 years later. Emma, if I can bring you in, what happened to you all those years ago when you were 17? Well, not as many years ago as Lee, obviously, because you're only 29 now, but it's still a long time ago. Yeah, so when I was 17, I was sat in a friend's garden with a group of people

and a fight broke out between two girls. One of them ended up with a cut to her head. And although I was not physically involved, six months later I was arrested for ABH which is actual bodily harm and this was through joint enterprise so ABH can hold a prison sentence or just you know be like mine kids fighting and now this is going to be on the record for the rest of my life. How were you punished for that? So I was given a £150 fine and then I had to pay the £100 court fees as well. Now Lee what effect has your record had on your career prospects?

Well it's been interesting because my career has been as an NHS manager so I've worked in the NHS all of my life I'm self-employed now but at the beginning of my career it didn't have much of an effect because I wasn't required I wasn't doing a patient facing job so I wasn't required to have a CRB check and most often on application forms I wasn't asked whether or not I had any conviction of any type but more recently I think the last 15 years or so obviously the box has been there to ask whether or not you have a conviction or a spent conviction. And even though my conviction was from so long ago and was spent about a year after it took place, I still had to say yes, that there was a previous conviction there

because it would come up on an enhanced DBS check. And has it stopped you getting any, Jo? Not to my knowledge it's put me in some quite embarrassing and awkward situations when I've had to discuss it and I've had to give um contextual information about it um so I don't to my knowledge think that it's actually made anyone not proceed with an application but it certainly made me feel very uncomfortable because I think you applied to be a school governor at one stage. Yes, yes.

And that's when it really came up. Yes, that's when it first came up, when I was going to be a school governor at my eldest son's primary school. And the application proceeded, it was fine, I was a school governor. But it was very, very awkward for me having to discuss that in that context where my son went to school. Emma, what about you? what effect has it had on your career prospects? So I am a carer but most employers don't always give the best sort of response when

I try and explain my record but also it's a hassle for them to take me on because they have to perform risk assessments on me to make sure I'm not a risk to their clients and this has a huge impact on my confidence and feels like a constant judgment so eventually I actually decided to go self-employed to sort of cut out that awkward interview process that I used to have to go through. So how do you earn your living now then? So I'm still a carer but I'm self-employed which also isn't easy because not many people believe how you can have a record that states you have actual bodily harm on your you've caused actual bodily harm yet i've never physically been involved in any violence so that's difficult but it's it's easier because i can go to the client direct and they get to know me and it cuts out having to do risk assessments and anything like that.

It's just a little less embarrassing, I guess. Now, Rachel, those two experiences, I mean, generally, what kind of jobs require a DBS check? So there's three levels of DBS check and both Lee and Emma are talking about jobs that require an enhanced check so that's anything working with children, vulnerable adults, sometimes in secure environments. There's also basic DBS checks and they'll only disclose unspent convictions so that can be anybody essentially that's just received a punishment other than a caution would have an unspent conviction for a period of time. And what's actually revealed in the cheque? What does it say you've done? Yeah it's a good question because I think a lot of people don't know what's

going to appear on that and they see it and they think well actually that doesn't describe what happened so as I think Lee mentioned it will describe that she has one conviction but it will go on to say that there are three counts of that so people can look at that she has one conviction, but it will go on to say that there are three counts of that. So people can look at that and think, one conviction? Well, why is that not being filtered? Or, you know, why is that still appearing after 33 years and so on? But actually we see that a lot, particularly with things like benefit fraud, where every benefit counts as a separate count.

And so that counts as multiple convictions, even though the period of offending was very limited, as it was in her case. There are filtering rules. What do they involve? So filtering was brought in in 2013, and that means that certain convictions or cautions can be removed from the DBS check after a period of time. And that period varies according to the age that you were at the time. But there are some rules about what can't be filtered as well. after a period of time. And that period varies according to the age that you were at the time. But there are some rules about what can't be filtered as well. So multiple convictions, as in Lee's case, will always appear on a cheque.

They'll never be filtered. And naturally, serious offences, even if they received a minor punishment, will never be filtered. And we're not asking that that changes. What we're asking for is a proportionate way of disclosing information. But, I mean, in Emma's case, ABH looks really serious. It does. But she was looking on.

She was not the one who actually delivered the bodily harm. So presumably your DBS check just says actual bodily harm and doesn't give any of the context. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's the real problem with it. As Emma describes, you know, people look at that and it says assault occasioning ABH. And people think, well, that sounds serious. And then she's in the position of having to explain what that means.

So a check doesn't give any context. And one of the problems for employers, of course, is they don't necessarily have the time or the experience or the interest in listening to context. And it puts them in a difficult position because they have to, as she says, carry out risk assessments and make decisions. And it's often easier to just not bother. Now, there was a Supreme Court ruling in January last year that said two aspects of the rules are disproportionate. What did that mean? So the multiple conviction rule,

as we mentioned, the Supreme Court found that that wasn't really doing its job. Essentially, it's not identifying whether there's a propensity to commit crime, because as we can see, sometimes crimes can happen, you can get multiple convictions for what's essentially the same crime. So that rule needs to change. The Supreme Court found that that's unlawful. And the other one is to do with reprimands and final warnings, basically a kind of youth caution. And those were designed to be rehabilitative for young people under 18, to keep them out of the justice system, really recognising that people make mistakes and they should have a chance to move on. At the moment, those are disclosed, but that needs to change as well. So in England and Wales at the moment,

the rules are the same as they were before that judgment, but they should be changing. Why do you reckon nothing's been done yet to change it? Well, I think we've had quite a lot of other things in the political sphere that have taken up a lot of time, and hopefully that can change now. I think also there's perhaps not a recognition of how much damage this causes people. So Emma and Ali have described, you know, they don't think it's prevented them from getting jobs, but they don't know that.

And actually the fact that it hasn't, that really makes you question whether that information is useful anyway. If it's not preventing them from getting a job, it's not really relevant. So why should they have to go through the embarrassment and the shame of disclosing that? Now, we did obviously ask the Home Office what their view of this was. And a government spokesperson said this. We continue to consider the Supreme Court judgment and wider recommendations around changes to criminal record disclosure. Public safety is our first priority and the system needs to protect the public while also giving offenders

a chance to rehabilitate. You must accept that there needs to be a system in place that will protect people. Absolutely. So we're not saying there shouldn't be a system. We're not saying that everything should become filtered at any stage. What we're asking for is a proportionate response to criminal records that remain disclosable to employers based on evidence. So we know, for example, that the time it takes for somebody to stop being a risk, you know, a period of living crime free is much shorter than the period that a criminal record still has to be disclosed. You know, Emma hasn't committed a crime for 12 years, you know, Lee 33 years. And yet, is that proportionate? Now, soliciting and loitering were also looked at in court in 2018. What was that about? What

happened as a result of that? So that was a slightly different case that was brought separately from the case that went to the Supreme Court, but many of the same issues. So because soliciting is a sexual offence, it's always disclosable, which means that the women who brought that case will always have to disclose that and have that disclosed on an enhanced check. They won that case because of the same reasons, essentially, that the Supreme Court found that that's incompatible with Article 8. But again, that hasn't changed yet. So we're hoping that, you know, this is a wider issue. This isn't just about, you know, particular offences and working in certain jobs. It's really about reflecting what the crime was and whether or not we want to continue to force people to be punished for that.

Let me just go back to Lee and Emma briefly. Lee, do you feel rehabilitated? It's ridiculous. I'm a 52-year-old middle-aged woman. I'm not a 19-year-old student who made a silly mistake, who's never done anything like that ever again. And it just seems ridiculous to still be judged and have to think and talk and examine

something that happened so long ago, which just isn't relevant to who I am today at all. And Emma, do you feel rehabilitated? Yeah, well, I agree with Lee. It was so long ago. What happened then does not represent me, who I am, in any shape or form. I just think it's unfair that it's currently,

it's going to be there forever. I was talking to Emma, Lee Hardy and Rachel Tynan. On the question of the DBS check, Jacqueline emailed us and said, I have been blighted all my life by my conviction at the age of 20. I'm now 66. I've lost work and been vetted for each job I've got. I'm a school librarian.

I can't join the police force, sit on a jury, be a probation officer or a social worker. I even was rejected for entry to the US this last year and had to be vetted and approved by Homeland Security in Washington. My conviction? Possession of cannabis in 1974, 46 years ago. And then on the monitoring of home education, Elise tweeted, I have homeschooled for two years. I would have loved support from the council, clubs, discounts, etc. And although I asked for it, the council never checked on my daughter's progress. Homeschooling is hard work. Stop assuming it's to do with abuse.

Often the very opposite. And Paul sent an email and said, someone needs to defend local authorities in this debate. Your correspondent immediately blamed Northampton to council, which is classic buck passing. Let's tell it like it is. This and the previous government have slashed local government budgets to the bone, yet they're blamed for lack of services.

Of course, there should be a register. Now, do join me tomorrow for Weekend Woman's Hour, when you'll have another chance to hear our discussion on the double discrimination facing black children with autism. Two mothers share their experience of misdiagnosis and stigma. Also is the billion pound beauty industry fueling fake news and pseudoscience when it comes to health and well-being. And Marion Dunn, who took up boxing at the age of 50, she shows us how to throw the perfect punch. That's Weekend Woman's Hour tomorrow at four o'clock. Join me if you can. Bye-bye. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

Anna Delvey was due to inherit $67 million. I'm so excited about what the future holds. She secured huge investments for a project in New York. She was very confident in her words. I'm so excited about what the future holds. She was very confident in her words. She's a con artist. I was watching this whole thing happen thinking it can't be true. Anna Delvey's Rise and Fall. Fake Heiress, a new six-part podcast on BBC Sounds. I was watching this whole thing happen thinking it can't be true. Download the free app to listen.

I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig,

the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.