Schools must do background checks on staff, ministry says

Loopholes tightened to ensure safety of students on campuses from predators

The Ministry of Education has asked schools and universities to conduct mandatory background checks on candidates who work on campuses for sexual crimes before they are hired.

For primary and secondary schools, when they plan to hire staff, they need to submit an application to the local education authorities to check the national teacher management information system whether the candidates have committed sex crimes, said a notice issued by the ministry on Thursday.

They also need to check whether the candidates have been included on the blacklist for teachers and whether their teaching credentials are valid or not, the notice said.

Higher education institutions should conduct the checks themselves.

If the candidates are found to have previous sexual crimes or other crimes making them unfit to work on campuses, the schools should notify them in writing and the candidates will be eligible to ask that checks be done again. Education authorities and universities should not violate the privacy of the candidates when checking the information, the notice added.

A guideline issued by the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Ministry of Education in November said that people who have committed crimes such as sexual assault, abuse, abduction and violence against children should be banned for life from working in the education sector.

Those who have served prison sentences and are deprived of their political rights are also banned for life from working in the sector, the guideline said.

The guideline has asked the courts to inform education authorities of such verdicts within 30 days of the ruling. In China, the Criminal Law, the Law on the Protection of Minors, the Teachers Law and the Regulation on Teachers' Qualifications all stipulate that people with specific criminal records cannot work as teachers and staff in educational institutions.

Qu Yifan, a researcher at the Institute of Education and Economy Research at the University of International Business and Economics, said the new measures can help enforce previous laws and regulations and prevent people with certain criminal records from becoming teachers or from working on campuses.

While the laws have been clear, in reality, some education authorities had difficulties in obtaining the criminal records of people, especially if they were from a different region, and there were also cases where authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to people with criminal records and let them enter campuses, she said.

The teaching ban for people with certain crimes is for life, which is a deterrence for people before they commit the crimes, Qu said, adding that teachers should have higher ethical and moral standards than other professions.

Also on Thursday, the Ministry of Education published on its website the name of seven teachers who have violated work ethics. It is the 12th time the ministry has publicly released the names of teachers for misconduct.

Among them, a teacher, surnamed Zhang, from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Hubei province, has been stripped of his teaching credentials and put on a blacklist for teaching after he sexually harassed female students by sending them obscene texts, pictures, videos and touched them inappropriately.

Another middle school teacher in Zhuzhou, Hunan province, surnamed Zhou, was sentenced by a court to eight years in prison in November for sexual assault and molesting underage female students multiple times. The teacher was fired, his teaching credentials were revoked and he has been banned from teaching for life.