In a blog piece, Justin Wyllie from Youth Rights UK discusses the difficulties that paranoia about paedophilia creates for youth workers: ‘Apply for a post as a volunteer youth worker with Islington for example and you will be told “people want to work with children for all sorts of reasons” in a tone that makes it quite clear you are viewed with the utmost suspicion’. He also makes some interesting points about how radical politics depends upon free relations between the generations: ‘The meeting of the older and the younger generation can be a crucible where social values and perceptions are critiqued…

Judith Gillespie from the Scottish Parent Teacher Council submitted evidence to the Scottish Education Committee about the problems with the new vetting legislation. Here are her notes on the meetings. ‘Brian Gorman of Disclosure Scotland was hard-line about supporting vetting but gave a frightening insight into his apparent lack of understanding of the technical IT needs of the system. By the time he had finished describing the information exchange system, I was quietly thinking “and you think that will work?” It was scary stuff and there is a serious need for an IT expert – and someone who knows about security –…

Child protection policies mean that young mountaineers are not getting training from experienced adults. Cameron McNeish, editor of The Great Outdoors magazine, says: ‘How do young people get experience of winter routes today? When I was a kid you joined a club and there was always someone who was willing to take young people out. Clubs don’t do that any more as they are scared of the litigation and paedophilia angle. Across all youth activities we seem to have demonised volunteers, particularly male volunteers, and have put all kinds of barriers in the way of working with young people.’ Early outdoor experience…

A Scottish couple were banned from helping their autistic son on to a bus in the morning, because they weren’t CRB checked. Their son was often distressed, so they helped him to fasten his seatbelt. Now the council says that only cleared adults will be allowed on to the bus. Currently the children are being given lessons in fastening their own seatbelts. This shows that the CRB system is all about satisfying a bureaucracy, and nothing to do with helping children on the ground. Nobody could claim that this rule did anything to combat paedophilia – it’s all about protecting institutional backs.…

The UK government wants to bring back the school trip. Yet the government has just waved through legislation that makes organising a school trip very difficult, if not impossible. The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill will mean that it is compulsory to criminal records check bus drivers who drive the kids, workers at the hotel where the children are staying, any parent or adult volunteers, and any foreign exchange families. Read on….

According to Pennie Goodman, from Leicester, barbershop choirs are now bringing through new burdensome child protection procedures. ‘My partner belongs to a male voice choir which is affiliated to a larger organisation. Many of the clubs do not have any members under 18 and of those that do, almost all attend with a family member. There is no one-to-one contact during rehearsals and yet a policy is coming into force which states that every club (including those with no under-18s or with a child attending with a parent) must have a CRB checked “Designated Person” who is responsible for any minors and…

This was in the Times notebook today: ‘My mother…belongs to an amateur dramatic society in Birmingham, called the Highbury Players. They have a youth theatre, too, who sometimes appear alongside the adults in productions such as The Diary of Anne Frank, and sometimes in shows they’ve written themselves, which star, well, pretty much all of them. Next year’s youth theatre extravaganza will be staged in January, but may not go ahead at all, because Birmingham City Council requires them to have trained chaperones to look after the kids in the show. My mum volunteered…. She’s a former teacher, and currently the vice-principal…

The Scottish Parent Teacher Council will be giving evidence to the Scottish Education Committee on 22 November, pointing out the grievous problems with the new Protecting Vulnerable Groups Bill. Read the full document: Evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Education Committee on the Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Bill. They say that the new vetting system : ‘Introduces a “back-watching” system that does not help children: It is quite clear from the many seminars and conferences that we have attended on this subject, that many organisations are using the legislation to protect their own backs rather than to protect children. They are concerned that…

Somebody emailed in with this story from the US, about the segregation of a local library: ‘I went down to our new voting place, a freshly built school on Munjoy Hill in Portland. The school also houses the local branch of the Portland Public Library, and indeed the school’s library and the branch library are intermixed. Well THAT lasted a few weeks! Now the branch library is closed to adults during the day so that patrons and school children can’t come into contact. How sad.’ This is a small case, perhaps, but it is a symbol of the growing encroachment on spaces…

There was an excellent article by Douglas Fraser in the Glasgow Herald about the new Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Bill, which will mean obligatory vetting for up to one million more Scots who work or volunteer with kids. Fraser notes that the ‘grannies army’ of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service will have to march down to the police station to be checked – at a cost of £250,000 to the organisation. The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations estimates that these new measures will cost its members a staggering £20million. The Herald article concludes: ‘Adding layer upon layer to the protection of young and…

A couple of people have emailed me to say that it’s now Rotary Club policy for Rotarians to always go out in twos – when they are driving an old woman to the shops, say, or leading children on a walk. Not for mutual support, but for each to ensure that the other isn’t abusing the young or old person in their care. Child protection guidelines for sports training also insist that adults work in pairs. Oxford University, for example, advises that student coaches and volunteers must work in twos when they are supervising children in the changing rooms. Other guidelines suggest…

In an interview for the Daily Mail, Manchester United boss Alex Ferguson reflected on how times have changed for youth football coaching: “’Today is very different from when I started as a coach,’ he says, pointing out that in 1974, when he became manager of East Stirlingshire, the drive came from people like himself, parents and youth clubs. ‘Now I’ve got 30 staff here. We’ve got welfare officers who deal with parents, we’ve got an education programme, child safety; every coach has to do a programme under the Child Protection Act. I had to do it myself. So we’re dealing with young…