Background checks for tutors, country by country

The four DBS levels in England and Wales

The Disclosure and Barring Service issues checks at four levels, and the difference between them is substantial.

A basic check shows unspent convictions and conditional cautions. A standard check shows spent and unspent convictions and cautions. An enhanced check shows everything in a standard check plus any information held by local police considered relevant to the role. An enhanced check with barred lists adds whether the applicant appears on the list of people barred from that type of work.

For work with children, the enhanced check with barred lists is the meaningful one. The others are materially weaker, and a profile saying only "DBS checked" does not tell you which was obtained.

• Basic — unspent convictions and conditional cautions
• Standard — spent and unspent convictions and cautions
• Enhanced — the above plus relevant local police information
• Enhanced with barred lists — the above plus barred-list status

Why self-employed tutors often cannot obtain the highest level

This is the part that surprises most parents. DBS checks are ordinarily requested by employers, voluntary organisations, or third parties acting on their behalf — not by individuals about themselves. GOV.UK puts it carefully: people applying for a role "can sometimes request an enhanced check or enhanced check with barred list for themselves".

Sometimes, not generally. A self-employed tutor working directly with families frequently has no employer to initiate the request, which means the absence of an enhanced certificate is not by itself evidence of anything. It also means a tutor who does hold one usually obtained it through a school, agency or organisation — so asking how and when they got it is a reasonable question with an informative answer.

Checks do not cross borders

A DBS certificate is a statement about records held in England and Wales. It says nothing about records held in Germany, Spain or the United Arab Emirates. Scotland operates Disclosure Scotland and Northern Ireland has AccessNI; both are separate systems with their own levels and terminology.

Across Europe more broadly, every state maintains its own criminal-records regime with its own rules on what may be disclosed, to whom, and for how long. Providers offering international background checks assemble them country by country under each jurisdiction's legal basis rather than running a single global search, and coverage and turnaround vary considerably by country.

The practical implication for online tutoring is direct. A tutor who has lived in three countries and holds a check from one has been checked in one. That is better than nothing and materially less than it sounds, and anyone presenting it as comprehensive clearance is overstating it.

What a criminal-record check cannot tell you

Even at the highest level, a check reports what was recorded. Conduct that was never reported, never investigated, or handled informally does not appear. The great majority of safeguarding concerns in any setting never reach a criminal record.

A check is also a snapshot with a date on it. It describes the position on the day it was issued and says nothing about the following week. Any platform or tutor implying continuous monitoring is describing a service that would require ongoing re-checking, which is rarely what is actually happening.

This is why references and identity verification carry more weight than parents typically assume. A contactable referee who supervised someone for two years has observed conduct that no records check would ever capture.

What to ask for, and what to accept

A sensible standard for private tutoring, proportionate to what is actually obtainable.

• Ask which level of check they hold, not merely whether they hold one
• Ask which country issued it, and when
• Ask to see the certificate itself, with the name matching their ID
• Where no check is available, weight references and identity verification more heavily
• Treat any claim of worldwide or permanent clearance as a reason for more scrutiny