Ucas may drop criminal disclosure rule for students

The university admissions service, Ucas, is considering whether to drop a requirement for students to declare criminal convictions when they apply to university, following a high-profile case exposed by the Guardian.

In the meantime, the service has tightened up its guidance section to make it clearer for students who apply to university in 2010.

A committee of admissions tutors from new and old universities and Ucas officials will examine the current policy from June. They will then report to the Ucas board a number of months later.

The announcement comes after the Guardian revealed how Majid Ahmed, a straight-A student, had his place at medical school withdrawn after tutors discovered he had omitted a spent conviction from his Ucas form.

Ahmed said he had been advised that he did not have to declare his spent conviction for burglary. For most subjects, this is the case – if a conviction is spent. But for medicine, a conviction is never spent.

A friend who works at Bradford University later advised Ahmed to “write immediately” to the medical schools to inform them of his conviction. He did this a day or two later.

The medical schools acknowledged his letter. They run Criminal Records Bureau checks on all their applicants and his conviction would have come up in any case.

Imperial College London, which had made him the offer, called him for a “fitness to practise” interview, when a panel of medical and non-medical experts decide whether an applicant with special circumstances is suitable to train as a doctor. He failed the interview and had his offer withdrawn.
Tightened guidelines

The current policy is that students do not need to declare a spent conviction unless they are applying for a course which would involve contact with vulnerable people such as medicine, teaching and social work.

But Ucas’s new, tighted guidelines say that students who apply for subjects such as medicine and social work face more and stricter checks for criminal convictions than those who apply for other subjects.

It reads: “If you have a relevant unspent criminal conviction… you must tick the box. However, you should be aware that courses in teaching, medicine, dentistry, health, social work, veterinary medicine, veterinary science and courses involving work with children or vulnerable adults, including the elderly or sick people, are exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 and different rules apply with regard to criminal convictions.

“The university or college may ask you to agree to have a check, called an enhanced disclosure or criminal record check, and if they do so, you must comply.”

Ucas has also moved a section on what students should do if they receive a criminal conviction after they apply to university from the bottom to near the top of the guidance notes.

Ahmed, now 19, had fallen in with the wrong crowd while trying to fit in at a new school at 16. He had been arrested for burglary, with others, and pleaded guilty. He was given a four-month referral order for community service, which he spent at a local YMCA.

It had been his only conviction. MPs and charities rallied to Ahmed’s cause and branded the withdrawal of his offer discriminatory.

The then higher education minister, Bill Rammell, arranged a meeting with Ahmed. Ahmed was later given a place at Manchester University’s medical school and is now in his first year.

Jill Johnson, director of policy and communication at Ucas, said university applications and criminal convictions was “an area that needed to be looked at”.

She said: “It is one of the areas that is challenging for both institutions and Ucas.”

Ucas was trying to make things clearer and to make “the question of criminal convictions work from an applicant’s perspective as well as from an institution’s perspective”, she said.

The General Medical Council has confirmed that people can still become doctors if they have a criminal record.

Doctors have to fill in a declaration of fitness to practise as part of their application for provisional registration. A candidate could be barred if they were thought to pose a risk, but evidence including references would be considered.

Ahmed said: “Part of the problem for me was that it wasn’t clear whether I should put my spent conviction down or not. It is great that Ucas are looking at the application form in this way. Hopefully even more changes will be made.”