Teacher in GB
What this register publishes today, what is missing, and the smallest change that would move it up.
What was found
The index’s one inversion, and it is instructive. A parent cannot check whether the person teaching their child holds qualified teacher status. The record service is for schools, colleges and supply agencies, reached through a government sign-in account, and the employer must confirm the individual’s identity and hold their teacher reference number and date of birth before searching. What is public is the opposite half: prohibition decisions are published and prohibited names appear on a published list. So the sanction is open and the credential is closed, which is the reverse of every other row here. The department has also wrestled publicly with the consequence: it pulled the children’s barred list out of the teacher record because users could see every record carrying an alert, and has said it does not want employers relying on that list as a credential check.
What it publishes
| Check | Answer | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| A public page per licence | Employers | Gives a reader something to look at and a checker something to archive and attest against. |
| A bulk export | No | Lets a consumer hold the whole list instead of fetching one licence at a time, and lets anyone hash it. |
| Machine readable | No | A CSV or JSON rather than a page built for a browser. Decides whether checking can be automated at all. |
| Signed | No | Makes the file impossible to forge or mirror convincingly. Nothing reaches grade A without it. |
The next step
Give every licence a stable address
The register exists but lives behind a search form, so there is nothing to link to, nothing to archive and nothing to attest against. A permanent address per licence costs little and moves this row to grade C on its own.
A grade describes a register, not the authority behind it and not the quality of its supervision. An authority can run an excellent register and still sit at grade D because it is a search form.
If this row is wrong, it gets corrected with the correction published beside it. The index is useful only if it can be argued with. Tell the lab.