Compliance packs

The nine ready-made sets of statutory and monitoring questions you can add to an application form template, and what each one contains.

A compliance pack is a block of pre-written questions for a specific purpose, such as safeguarding checks for schools or equality monitoring. You add a pack to an application form template in one step instead of writing each question yourself. There are nine packs.

Who can use them

Packs are added and removed in Settings under Application Form Templates. That page is open to System Admin and HR users only. Other roles do not see it, and template changes from anyone else are rejected. If your organisation is part of a group and a template is shared from the parent company, it is read-only in the subsidiary and only the parent company can change it.

Recruiters editing a job's application form cannot add a pack from the job. They can see and remove packs that came in through a template (see below).

The nine packs

The question wording and answer options come from the pack when you add it. Questions marked optional can be left blank by the candidate; all the others must be answered.

Education - Safeguarding & DBS

Six questions, all required except the certificate number.

Do you have a valid Enhanced DBS certificate? (dropdown: On the Update Service, Certificate only, Will need new check, Applied and awaiting result)
Certificate number (text, optional)
Have you completed Safeguarding Training (Level 1 or above)? (dropdown: within the last 12 months, more than 12 months ago, not yet completed)
Are you subject to any prohibition orders from the Teaching Regulation Agency? (No, or Yes with details)
Have you ever been disqualified from working with children or vulnerable adults? (No, or Yes with details)
Are you aware of any other information that may affect your suitability to work with children? (No, or Yes with details)

Education - Teaching Qualifications

Do you have Qualified Teacher Status (QTS)? (UK QTS, equivalent overseas qualification, unqualified, in progress)
Teacher Reference Number (TRN) (text, optional)
What teaching qualification(s) do you hold? (multiple choice: PGCE, BEd, GTP/School Direct, Teach First, Assessment Only Route, Overseas Trained Teacher, Other)
Have you completed your NQT/ECT induction? (fully completed, in progress, not yet started, exempt)

Education - Reference Requirements

Can we contact your current employer for a reference? (Yes, No but contact me first, Not currently employed)
Please explain any gaps in your employment history exceeding 28 days (text, optional)
Have you lived or worked outside the UK in the last 5 years? (No, or Yes with details)

Healthcare - Basic Compliance

Are you registered with a professional regulatory body? (NMC, GMC, HCPC, GPhC, GDC, Other, Not applicable)
Registration number (text, optional)
Is your registration current and without restrictions? (Unrestricted, With conditions, Lapsed and awaiting renewal, Suspended)
Do you have a valid Enhanced DBS certificate? (On the Update Service, Certificate only, Will need new check)

Equality & Diversity Monitoring

Seven questions, all optional. Six of them offer a Prefer not to say answer; the adjustments question is Yes or No.

Gender
Ethnic group (categories follow UK Census classifications)
Age range (18 to 24, 25 to 34, 35 to 44, 45 to 54, 55+)
Whether the candidate considers themselves to have a disability
Whether they have requested reasonable adjustments for the recruitment process
Religion or belief
Sexual orientation

Criminal convictions

One optional question: Do you have any unspent criminal convictions to declare? The options are No convictions, Spent conviction and Prefer not to say. It is separate from the equality pack, so you can run equality monitoring without asking about convictions.

Personal Circumstances Monitoring

Three optional questions, collected for equality monitoring only: marital or civil partnership status, caring responsibilities (child or children, disabled adult, older person, other, or none), and date of birth. The date of birth question tells the candidate it is not used in shortlisting.

Article 55 Fair Employment (NI)

One optional question for Northern Ireland roles, asking which community the candidate belongs to: Protestant, Roman Catholic, or neither. The help text tells the candidate the answer is collected under Article 55 of the Fair Employment and Treatment (NI) Order 1998 for monitoring only and will not affect the application.

UK Inclusion Schemes

Three optional Yes or No questions that set the matching flags on the candidate: whether they are a member or veteran of the UK Armed Forces or a close family member, whether they want to be considered under the Disability Confident guaranteed interview scheme, and whether they are a care leaver. The help text under each question is written as an employer that runs the scheme, so check it suits your organisation before you use the pack.

Adding a pack to a template

Go to Settings and open Application Form Templates.
Select the template you want to change.
On the page of the form where the questions should sit, click Add pre-built, next to Add Field.
Choose the pack from the list. The same menu also holds items that are not packs, such as References and Address.
The pack's questions are added to the end of that page, and a message confirms it.
Click Save.

A pack already on the form shows Added and cannot be selected again. Nothing reaches candidates until you save.

Once a pack is on a template, jobs that use the template carry it. When you choose a template on a job, or a job is created from your default template, its fields and packs come across together. Applying a template to a job replaces all of the job's current fields and pages.

What happens to fields already on the form

Existing fields are not changed, moved or removed. The pack's questions are appended after them. Nothing checks for overlap, so if you add both Education - Safeguarding & DBS and Healthcare - Basic Compliance to the same form, the Enhanced DBS question appears twice. Delete one copy if you do not want both.

Pack questions count towards the form limit of 200 input fields. If adding a pack would take you over, remove other questions first.

Editing pack questions

You can reword a pack question or delete an individual question you do not need. The answer type is fixed: a dropdown stays a dropdown. If you delete some but not all of a pack's questions, the pack still counts as added and stays in the applied list.

Removing a pack

Open the template in Application Form Templates.
Scroll below the form fields to the Applied compliance packs card. It appears only when at least one pack is on the form.
Click Remove next to the pack.
In the Remove this compliance pack? box, click Remove pack, or Cancel to keep it.
Click Save. Until you do, the removal has not been applied.

Every question the pack added is deleted from the form, including any you reworded. Fields that did not come from the pack stay. Show or hide rules on other fields that depended on a removed question are removed with it. Answers candidates have already submitted are kept.

The same Applied compliance packs card appears on a job's application form step, so a recruiter can take a pack off a single job without changing the template.

Packs and personal data

Equality, convictions and community background answers are sensitive, so the packs tag them as compliance categories. For the equality pack (except reasonable adjustments), Criminal convictions, Personal Circumstances Monitoring and Article 55, individual answers are hidden from the candidate profile and from the application PDF. They appear only in aggregated reporting, in the diversity report and the Article 55 report. The reasonable adjustments answer stays visible, because recruiters need it to arrange the adjustment.

The Personal Circumstances and Article 55 questions are also marked as protected personal information, which keeps them out of anonymised shortlisting.

The safeguarding, qualifications, references, healthcare and inclusion scheme packs are ordinary questions. Their answers show on the candidate profile like any other form answer.

Each field in the template editor has a Compliance classification setting, with options such as Gender, Ethnicity, Age range, Disability, Criminal convictions, Religion or belief, Sexual orientation, Community background (Article 55), Marital or civil partnership status, Caring responsibilities and Date of birth, or Not classified. Changing it asks you to confirm. Clearing it makes that field's answers visible on the profile and PDF again.

Staff cannot enter or change monitoring answers on a candidate's behalf. Only the candidate records them, through their own application.