How a Norwich youth orchestra cleared every adult before its summer tour

Hannah Sutcliffe is volunteer coordinator at Wensum Youth Strings in Norwich: 64 young players aged seven to 18, three ensembles rehearsing on Saturday mornings at a high school in the west of the city, six paid section tutors and 21 volunteers. In January 2026, with the orchestra's first residential tour booked for July, she found that nine of its 27 regular adults had no usable DBS record.

Where the orchestra started

Hannah is a primary school business manager who plays viola in an adult amateur orchestra. Her son joined Wensum's junior ensemble at eight, and she took on the volunteer coordinator role in September 2025, mostly, she says, because nobody else would.

She inherited a spreadsheet called "DBS FINAL v3".

• It listed 22 names. Five had left the orchestra, and seven current adults were missing from it entirely.
• There was an issue date for some people, a certificate number for others, and no recheck date for anyone.
• Fourteen scanned certificates sat in a shared drive folder that six committee members could open.
• Two parents who had volunteered at the October half-term workshop were still waiting to be cleared in December, because applications were only started after a committee meeting approved them.

What was actually wrong?

The orchestra did ask for checks. It just had no idea which ones it had.

When Hannah went through every regular adult in January, she found 18 of 27 with a current check at the right level. Of the other nine, four had never been checked at all, three held certificates more than three years old, and two had shown a certificate from another organisation that nobody had verified. One of those two was a tutor who had been leading the junior cellos alone every week since 2023.

The July tour made it urgent. Four nights in a residential centre in the Peak District meant overnight supervision, which put every chaperone into regulated activity.

"Nobody had done anything dodgy. Everybody had a certificate somewhere. What we couldn't do was prove, on a Saturday morning, that the adult in the room with the second violins had been checked at the right level in the last three years. If a parent had asked me, I'd have had to say I wasn't sure."

What Wensum Youth Strings set up in Bitir

Hannah and the welfare officer, a retired children's social worker, used our guide to DBS checks for club volunteers to decide who needed what, then rebuilt the records over February half-term.

1. Every adult sorted by role. Six tutors and four tour chaperones need enhanced checks with the children's barred list. The 17 other volunteers, who help in rehearsals alongside a tutor, need enhanced checks without it.
2. Five facts per adult on each volunteer's Bitir profile, visible only to Hannah and the welfare officer: check level, certificate number, issue date, who saw it and when, and Update Service status.
3. A dated recheck task set three years after each issue date, assigned to the volunteer and visible to Hannah.
4. Checks started on sign-up day. New volunteers get the umbrella body link the day they say yes, and anyone who already holds a certificate is asked to join the Update Service.
5. One rota rule: nobody goes on a rehearsal or tour rota until their check is recorded at the right level, and only cleared adults are made managers of a section channel.

The orchestra pays for the six tutors' checks, because they are paid and do not count as volunteers. The other 21 cost nothing apart from the umbrella body's admin fee, which the committee agreed to cover.

The hardest conversation was the shared drive. Two committee members wanted to keep the scans "just in case". Hannah's answer was that a folder of other people's criminal record certificates was a bigger risk than anything it protected against, and the welfare officer backed her. All 14 were deleted in March.

What changed in the numbers?

Hannah compared January 2026 with the week before the tour in June.

The 11-day median covers six new volunteers recruited for the tour. The slowest took 19 days, because the applicant had moved house twice in five years and the umbrella body needed extra address history.

The Update Service numbers did the most work. When three-year rechecks came up for four volunteers in May, three of them were on the Update Service, so Hannah ran a status check with their consent in a few minutes each instead of starting new applications.

"The tour company asked for written confirmation that every adult travelling had an enhanced check with a barred list check. It took me ten minutes to send it. In January it would have taken me a fortnight, and I'm not sure I'd have got it right."

What Hannah does in Bitir

• Member profiles with role-limited visibility for each adult's five-field check record, which tutors and parents cannot see.
• Dated tasks for three-year rechecks, assigned to the volunteer so the reminder reaches them as well as her.
• Roles that make only cleared adults managers of each section's channel.
• Attendance registers for every Saturday rehearsal, showing which adults were present alongside the players.
• A deadline poll for tour chaperone availability, so she knew by March which four adults needed barred list checks.

What she would tell another group

• List every adult who turns up regularly, not just the ones on the old spreadsheet.
• Decide the level by role, not by person. The tutor and the chaperone need the barred list; the rehearsal helper usually does not.
• Delete the scans. Record the facts and hand the certificate back.
• Ask every volunteer to join the Update Service in the week their certificate arrives.
• Make the rota depend on the record. That one rule did more than everything else.

What's next

The orchestra is adding written references for the six tutors from September, since a DBS check only shows what has been recorded. Hannah also wants every new volunteer cleared within ten days by the end of the 2026-27 season, and plans to report the figure at the AGM with the recheck list for the year ahead.

Related reading: DBS checks for club volunteers, and running a volunteer rota for a community group.