Classrooms facing crisis as they wait for background checks on 12,000 teachers

Headteachers spoke yesterday of an "emergency" in schools after the Government admitted that criminal record checks on more than 12,000 teachers had still not been completed days before the start of the new term.

Nearly 2,000 children at schools that were due to open this week have been forced to miss lessons because staff were not vetted in time.

One school remained closed yesterday while two others told some pupils to stay at home because ministers insist that no staff can work with children until they have been fully checked.

The problems could spread when most schools attempt to open next week. London and inner-city schools are expected to be particularly badly affected because they have the highest turnover of teachers.

The Government's new Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), which was set up to centralise police checks and vetting of all staff who work with children, was supposed to complete each check within three weeks. But a huge backlog has developed with about 100,000 checks still outstanding.

Schools in Leicestershire and Leicester were due to reopen yesterday. A spokesman for the Home Office confirmed that 126 teachers were still waiting to be checked in the two authorities.

Moat Community College in Leicester, a large comprehensive school with more than 1,000 pupils, was forced to shut because five teachers had not been cleared.

Kestrels' Field Primary School in Leicester had to ask the parents of 85 children who arrived for lessons to take them home again. David Axton, the school's headteacher, blamed ministers for not giving schools more time to prepare, although he accepted that staff without full police clearance should not be allowed to work with children. "I fully understand the reason for the decision," he said. "I live in Suffolk so events in Soham have been very close to home. But the decision should have been made and communicated to schools much earlier than it was so we could have made alternative arrangements."

At ADT City Technology College in Wandsworth, south London, 540 students are missing the first three days of term because 12 teachers had not been cleared.

The Home Office said it was working with the CRB and the Department for Education and Skills to ensure the backlog of urgent applications by teaching staff was cleared by Wednesday. Officials said that only 10,000 of the 100,000 checks outstanding were more than three weeks old.

Slightly more than 12,000 urgent checks on teachers were still pending. However, 5,000 of those were delayed because of errors on the application forms, which had been returned to the applicants for correction. The remaining 7,000 would be fast-tracked through the system to ensure they were complete before the start of term, a Home Office spokeswoman said.

John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said he had no faith in the pledge to clear the backlog. He said he had warned officials about the potential problems in Leicester and Leicestershire a week ago.

"I have absolutely no confidence that they can deliver when most schools open next week," he said."There is going to be a very ragged start to the new term."

Phil Willis, the Liberal Democrat education spokesman, said: "Shutting schools because of government incompetence is simply not good enough."