On 1 September the rules on who needs a DBS check in a school changed, and most of the attention went exactly where you would expect. Schools spent August auditing volunteer lists and working out which parent helpers now need an enhanced check. That was the right thing to do, and by all accounts most schools did it properly.
What I have heard much less about is the other half of the picture. The same guidance carries a deadline that starts running the moment a governor is elected. Autumn is when most parent governor elections happen. If your election drifts, that clock does not wait for you.
What actually changed on 1 September
Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026 was published on 7 July and came into force on 1 September. The headline change comes from the Crime and Policing Act 2026, which removed what most people called the supervision exemption.
Until this term, a volunteer who was supervised by a member of staff was not treated as being in regulated activity. That exemption has gone. A volunteer is now in regulated activity if they teach, train, instruct, care for or supervise children on more than three days in any 30 day period, or overnight between 2am and 6am. The overnight rule catches the parent who helps on a single residential trip, however rarely they otherwise come into school.
Anyone who meets that test needs an enhanced DBS check including children's barred list information, and they belong on the single central record. Days count cumulatively across settings, so a volunteer who helps at two schools in the same trust adds them together. The DBS Update Service is free for volunteers and worth pushing hard, because it lets one check travel rather than being repeated.
Occasional volunteers are not caught by this. A parent helping at a one-off summer fair or accompanying a day trip sits where they always did. Paid staff were already in regulated activity, so nothing changes for them.
The exemption that let a supervised volunteer sit outside regulated activity no longer exists. Supervision is now a mitigation, not a way around the check.
Governors sit under a different rule, with a tighter deadline
Being a governor is not itself regulated activity, so a governor does not normally need the barred list element. What a governor does need is an enhanced DBS check, and the governing board must apply for it within 21 days of that person being appointed or elected.
None of that is new. The 21 days have been sitting there for years. What is new is the level of scrutiny falling on checks generally this term, and the awkward fact that most boards have never really stress tested whether their election timetable and their vetting timetable line up.
Read the wording again. The 21 days run from appointment or election. Not from the first meeting the new governor attends. Not from the day the clerk gets round to the paperwork. From the day the result is declared.
Where the timetable quietly breaks
Here is the pattern I see most often, and it is nobody's fault in particular.
A paper parent governor election goes out in the book bags in late September. Nominations trickle in. There are more candidates than seats, so a ballot is needed. Papers go home, come back over a fortnight, and the office counts them when there is a quiet hour. The result is declared, informally, sometime in the second half of October. The new governor is warmly welcomed at the November meeting, and that is the meeting where somebody mentions the DBS form.
By then the 21 days are long gone. Worse, nobody can point to the exact date the election concluded, because it concluded in a drawer rather than on a record. When the question comes, and this term it is more likely to come, the honest answer is that the board does not know when the clock started.
That is the real problem. Not the check itself, which is free for governors and straightforward to apply for. The problem is that an undocumented election gives you no defensible start date.
A check you did late is a fixable problem. An election with no recorded conclusion date is a governance problem.
What a board should be able to show
If I were sitting on a board this term, I would want four things in the papers rather than in somebody's memory.
- The date the election opened and the date it closed, recorded, not recalled.
- The date each result was declared, and the date the DBS application was made for each new governor.
- The volunteer audit, showing who has been reassessed against the new three day and overnight thresholds, and what was decided for those who fall outside regulated activity.
- The written risk assessments for volunteers who are not in regulated activity. The guidance is clear that not being in regulated activity does not mean no checks and no thinking. It means the decision has to be made deliberately and recorded.
That last one catches people out. Schools assume the change only creates work for volunteers who now need checks. It also creates a documentation duty for the ones who do not.
The wider point about asking parents for things
There is something worth sitting with here. This term schools are asking more of their parent community than usual. More paperwork from the regular helpers. More scrutiny of the residential volunteers. And, at the same time, they are asking parents to stand for governor and to vote.
If the process of saying yes to a school feels bureaucratic and unclear, fewer parents say yes. That is not a compliance risk, it is a participation risk, and it is the harder one to fix. A school that runs a clean, quick, visible election is not just protecting itself on paper. It is showing parents that the effort of getting involved is respected.
What I would do this week
Find out when your autumn parent governor election is actually happening, and work backwards. Fix the closing date. Fix the declaration date. Put both in the board calendar now, and put the DBS application in the same calendar entry, not in a separate mental note held by one person.
Then ask your clerk a plain question: if somebody asked us tomorrow for the exact date our last governor election closed, could we answer without hunting? If the answer is no, that is worth fixing before this term's election rather than after it.
Running the election online sorts a good deal of this on its own, because the open date, the close date and the declaration are recorded as the election happens rather than reconstructed afterwards. That is most of what we built Choice Voting to do. But the principle matters more than the tool. Know when your election ended, write it down, and start the 21 days from there.