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One strike and you’re out: the case of Majid Ahmed

by · 1st July, 2008

This morning, one of the topics on the Vanessa Feltz show was a young man named Majid Ahmed from Bradford, who had been offered a place at Imperial College, London, to study medicine. Three years earlier, he had been convicted of burglary; not realising that he had to declare his convictions (which were “spent”, but this is not an issue with medicine), he informed the medical schools to which he applied in a letter afterwards. After he received the offer, he was called in for a “fitness to practise” interview, which led to his offer being withdrawn. (The story was reported in the Guardian Education supplement today, and you can listen to the actual show on the website here. More: Majid Ahmed on CIF.)

The actual “burglary” he was convicted of, in terms of his role, consisted of entering a property others had told him was theirs, but in fact was not, a fact he became aware of minutes after entering. He pled guilty, and received a four-month referral order, a kind of community service order which is only given to first-time offenders. It was suggested that he might have been ill-advised to plead guilty, or had done so to avoid worse consequences if he had been found guilty anyway (which he might have expected, being from a deprived and crime-ridden area).

One call that stuck out was from a lawyer who herself grew up in a rough area (in Ilford, east London), who said she faced temptations to get into trouble when she was that age, but had been told by her parents that if she did, her dreams of being a lawyer would be just dreams. She accused him of not facing up to his responsibilities, admitting that he had pled guilty, and thus admitted that he was dishonest, while conceding that he may have received bad legal advice. She also opined that medicine is one area where standards cannot be lowered, that “three years is nothing in the life of a teenager”, which in my experience is anything but the case, and that he try again in a few years.

There are two separate issues to consider when deciding whether someone in this situation should even be admitted to medical school in the first place. The first is whether someone with a petty burglary conviction incurred when he was 15 would be fit to practise by the age of 23, let alone at any later point in his life. Medical training takes five years, and this is followed by several years of doing junior “house officer” jobs; specialising is something a doctor does in his late twenties or later. If this individual had committed a burglary in which he had threatened and robbed people, let alone did anyone harm, I would certainly not wish anyone to start on a road which would lead to a sensitive job, not that it would matter, because he would most likely still be in prison. However, in this case, if he was telling the truth during his radio interview, it did not in my opinion.

The second, perhaps more pertinent, issue is whether the conviction would prevent him getting a doctor’s job, which in this day and age it might well do, making his medical training a waste of time for both him and the college. In the UK these days, any criminal record might prevent someone taking a sensitive job such as being a doctor, or anything which involves children or other vulnerable people. A while back, while working on an agency driving job at a mobile library service in south London, I was told off for taking a stack of books into an old lady’s house, because only people who have been checked can go into an old lady’s house on the job (anyone else has to pretend to be a salesman and trick their way in). It is a well-known problem that increasing numbers of adults are being required to prove that they have no criminal records to do any kind of work, paid or voluntary, which involves contact with children, and it has been suggested that the distrust, particularly of men, is such that people will not hug or help a distressed child anymore (see this article in the current New Statesman).

Of course, not having a criminal record does not mean that one is actually suitable for such work, but a conviction for burglary, or even some sort of dishonesty that does not involve physically harming children, or indeed anyone, or a fight outside a pub, does not take away one’s suitability to work with children either. If it did, such people would not be deemed suitable parents either, and there would be an awful lot more children in care. The record check culture, then, gives a false sense of security, particularly when builders, meter readers and others come into our houses without needing to be record-checked. The fact that one has not been caught does not mean one is a decent person; I wonder how many people Imperial College admits who were bullies when they were 15 or 16, and had in fact inflicted harm or distress on children; since their antics never attracted the attention of the police, they found their careers in medicine and their path to being pillars of society unimpeded.

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