DBS and safeguarding in Kadim
Some roles, like helping in the madrasa, legally need a valid enhanced DBS check. Kadim helps a mosque keep those checks current and provable, while holding as little about a person as the job allows. This page explains how that works and where the hard lines are.
The five facts, and nothing more
For each person who has been checked, Kadim stores exactly five things:
- the check's status,
- the certificate number,
- the issue date,
- the level, and
- the workforce the check covers.
That is the whole record. The certificate itself is never stored. There is no notes box, no upload, and no scan. If there were a leak, there is nothing in it but those five facts, and the certificate number is encrypted at rest so even that is not readable. The levels and workforces are set out in The five DBS facts Kadim stores.
Every look is written down
Safeguarding data is the most sensitive thing Kadim holds, so it is the most watched. Every time anyone, including a trustee, views, records, changes or exports a safeguarding record, Kadim writes a who / what / when entry to an append-only audit log. Nothing can be quietly read or altered, and the Export audit button turns that history into a PDF a regulator can read.
Only trustees, and never as a lever
Only trustees see the certificate facts. Coordinators see the status chips so they know who can be placed, but never the underlying details. And a trustee's read access to safeguarding records is never blocked, even if a mosque's subscription lapses. Compliance is a duty, not a commercial lever, so it is never held hostage to a bill.
Your record belongs to one mosque
A person's safeguarding record is scoped to the single mosque that holds it. It is never shared with, read by, or moved to another mosque. This is a technical boundary you don't have to take on trust: a mosque cannot reach into another mosque's records.
Carrying your status to a second mosque is not available yet
The intention is that if you have been checked at your home mosque and want to help somewhere new, you don't have to be checked again from scratch: with your consent, the second mosque would run its own status check against the DBS Update Service and record its own entry, your home mosque's records untouched, and your consent yours to withdraw.
Kadim cannot do this today. The connection to the DBS Update Service was never built, so nothing in the app can confirm a certificate is current. We removed the offer rather than leave a control that looks like a safeguarding check and isn't one: a status on screen has to be a status somebody actually checked. A second mosque needs its own trustee to record a check they have seen. The volunteer's guide is Share your DBS status with a second mosque.
A recorded skill is never a clearance
Kadim also lets volunteers declare skills, so a coordinator can call out an electrician or a first-aider without spamming everyone. A skill is a matching hint and nothing more. It never grants access to anything. A DBS-gated role still requires the DBS check, every time, at the mosque doing the placing. The check runs in the aggregate, not in the interface, so there is no way around it.