A rock and a hard place

These days, before you're allowed within three football pitch lengths of a UK school, you've got to go through a CRB check. This involves a laboriously thorough and thoroughly laborious paper-chase through the annals of your life, to be followed by the very same by the authorities through their digitized version.

Some bright spark at Whitehall even decreed that the result of the process is non-transferrable. This means: all of those part-time staff working with catering companies, any supply teachers ready to fill in any absence of regular staff, or in fact any professional teacher who has been teaching for it-matters-not-how-long, must undergo these routine checks every time they find themselves working for a new school. Before they find themselves working for a new school.

Wiki has the words 'institutionalized', 'protectionism', 'regulatory policies (...social or other) and 'damaging state meddling' for the entry of, 'nanny state'. You don't necessarily need the last quote to understand the ills of such a characteristic of the modern British way of life. Just cut, paste and put the others in any order you choose, and add filler.

I spent three years working in schools in Japan. Unfortunately, this experience is also non-transferrable. Fair enough. A Japanese school is a completely different environment than an English school. I'll have to have a CRB check. No escaping that one, Guy!

I do some research.

Maybe my former supervisor at the Board of Education in Yamagata can help? This can't be such an unusual request. There must be lots of ex-JETs (the programme I initially went to Japan with) with aspirations to teach back in their home country.

My ex supervisor calls the police in Japan - the logical starting point for a police certificate. They tell her tell me to ask the Embassy of Japan.

I send an e-mail winging it's way into one of those dark little crevices tucked out of sight and everywhere on the walls of the great black cave of the Internet I peer into on a daily basis. No reply from the Embassy of Japan.

I call. The lady explains that in order to obtain the form it is actually the same process as I had read of that morning (yesterday morning) with a crumpled frown on my face. Collect a form from the Embassy of Japan, take it to a police station, have my fingerprints taken, return the form to Japan, and wait for 2 to 3 months.

Fingerprints?

2 to..?

I feel stuck in between good old modern British state protectionist meddlesomeness, and that quintessentially Japanese penchant for administrative knot-balls.