Copenhagen cannot approve 250 teachers after police IT error

About 250 teachers and childcare workers in Copenhagen are waiting for their employment to be approved because the issuing of child certificates has been suspended, DR reports. The city’s children and youth mayor, Jakob Næsager of the Conservative Party, called the situation “very, very critical”.

“We have 250 teachers and educators waiting to have their employment approved, and we are missing the child certificate,” Næsager said.

A child certificate is legally required when hiring teachers in primary schools, childcare workers in kindergartens, or coaches working with children and young people in sports organisations.

The certificates were suspended after the Danish National Police discovered an error in the Central Criminal Register that may have caused previous convictions to be deleted from people’s criminal records. Police said they could not rule out the possibility that people convicted of child sexual abuse had been issued clean child certificates.

In Copenhagen, the suspension has left schools, after-school programmes and childcare centres short of staff. The municipality has relied more heavily on existing employees and its approved pool of temporary workers, which has so far covered the gap.

However, many of the temporary workers are students who started or resumed their studies on September 1. The municipality typically hires an average of 200 new employees each month, Næsager said, making the situation unsustainable in the long term.

The error was discovered around the turn of the month, when many new employees are normally hired. The Danish National Police has not provided a timeline for locating and fixing the errors so that child certificates can be issued again.

About 340,000 child certificates are obtained annually across Denmark. In 2020, 149 contained remarks, including 24 related to sports.