Working With Children Check (NSW)
CodesAPI credentialType WWCC_NSWSpreadsheet import wwcc with State NSWAll credential codes
A Working With Children Check (WWC) is the clearance required to do child-related work in New South Wales, administered by the Office of the Children's Guardian (OCG). Oho confirms it against the OCG employer portal.
NSW is the state where monitoring works best, and also the one with the most set-up. Both come from the same thing: the OCG records your organisation against each worker you verify.
Who needs it
Anyone in child-related work in NSW. The check distinguishes paid employees from volunteers, and the identifier says which: an E suffix for an employee, a V suffix for a volunteer.
What Oho needs
The clearance number, the holder's name, and their date of birth — NSW won't match a worker without one.
WWC1234567E — the letters WWC, seven digits, then E for an employee or V for a volunteer.
A worker who has applied but isn't cleared yet has an application number instead: APP1234567 — APP and seven digits, no suffix. Oho accepts either, and works out which portal field to use from the prefix.
Case doesn't matter. Don't add spaces or hyphens — those aren't stripped.
The E/V suffix is part of the number, not decoration. A worker who moves from volunteering to paid work gets a new number ending E, and the old V number stops being the right one to hold.
Most registers match on name and card number. NSW matches on date of birth too, and a worker without one on their record can't be checked at all — the result sits unverified rather than coming back as a failure you'd notice. If you're importing, fill in Date of Birth; see Spreadsheet columns.
The credential keeps its own copy of the name and date of birth
This is the detail behind most unexplained Not found results, so it's worth knowing.
The details sent to the OCG portal are the ones stored on the WWC credential, not the ones on the worker's profile. The credential takes its copy once — from the person's own answers if they supplied the card through a fetch request or recruitment check, otherwise from the worker's profile — and that copy is what every later check uses. You can see it on the credential's page, under Holder Name and Date of Birth.
Correcting the worker's profile carries onto the credential when the credential was still holding the value you just corrected, and resets it to Not verified yet — though for a credential that's been checked before, that doesn't bring its next check forward (see When a credential is checked). It deliberately leaves alone a credential whose date of birth is something different again — Oho can't tell a stale copy from a deliberate one. That's the case that strands: the profile looks right, the card is valid, and the check keeps coming back Not found against a date of birth you can only see on the credential.
So when a valid card won't verify, compare the credential's Date of Birth against the card, not just the worker's profile.
Copy the family name exactly as it's printed on the card. The OCG searches on the family name, and holds it the way the card shows it — which isn't always how the worker's profile splits the name. A two-word surname (Manpreet Kaur rather than Kaur), a single name, or a given name held as part of the surname all need the credential to match the card, not the profile. To change it, open the credential, click Edit credential and correct Family name. The NSW form has no date of birth field — that copy changes through the worker's profile, as above.
Before you start
NSW needs a login for your organisation's OCG employer portal account, configured once as a Verification Source. Unlike the public registers, there's no way to check a NSW clearance anonymously — the OCG portal is the only route, and it's tied to the employer.
Oho signs in on your behalf using credentials you provide, which are stored encrypted. Until that's set up, NSW checks sit in progress rather than returning a result.
A NSW verification source names the organisations it verifies for — one OCG login often covers several, so it's a list rather than a single choice. A worker or applicant whose organisation isn't on that list is skipped: not failed, not flagged, just not checked, with nothing on the record to say so. Someone with no organisation at all is skipped for the same reason.
The match is on the organisation's name, ignoring case and surrounding spaces. A renamed organisation that no longer matches the name on the source stops being checked, silently.
So if a worker's NSW check never produces a result, check their organisation against the source's list before looking at their card. This is the common answer to "will a candidate with no organisation be verified?" — they won't.
The same is true of the other portal-backed Working With Children sources: SA and QLD each bind a portal account to an organisation, and workers are matched to their organisation's source at verify time. The public-register states — VIC, WA, TAS, NT — have no organisation scoping at all.
How Oho verifies it
Oho signs in to the OCG employer portal and looks each worker up. It isn't a real-time API — results come back within hours rather than seconds, as part of a batch run rather than the moment you press a button.
A Not found is only recorded once the portal has said it twice (below). If the second look doesn't confirm it — or the portal returns no row Oho can tie to the card — nothing is written. A card that already has a result keeps it; a card that has never had one stays In progress, and keeps doing so run after run while the details are wrong. So a new NSW card stuck at In progress for days deserves the same check as a Not found: the name and date of birth on the credential against the card.
When a credential is checked
Each NSW run checks the credentials that are due: ones that have never been checked, and ones whose last check is older than the re-check window — a year, by default. A credential checked last month isn't due, so the next run passes over it.
Pressing Verify on a NSW credential doesn't check it, queue it or record anything. The message reads Verified — IN_PROGRESS, but nothing is sent to the OCG and nothing changes on the credential or its history. That's expected: only a run can check NSW.
So what you can expect:
| Situation | When it's checked |
|---|---|
| A newly added NSW credential | The next run |
| A credential checked before, then corrected — its reference number, holder name or date of birth | It shows Not verified yet, but the run still goes by the date of its last check, so it isn't due until the re-check window passes. Email [email protected] to have it re-checked sooner |
| Anything else already checked | When the re-check window passes |
A single Not found is also what a throttled or half-rendered portal page looks like for someone holding a perfectly valid clearance — and recording one stamps a verification date, so a wrong answer would stand until the next scheduled check.
So Oho doesn't take the first one. A Not found is asked again from a fresh sign-in after a short pause, and only recorded if the portal says the same thing twice. A different, real answer on the second look is recorded instead. If the second look gives nothing usable, nothing is written at all — the credential keeps the verdict it had and stays due for the next run.
The credential doesn't flip and then correct itself: until a Not found is confirmed, nothing changes on it. The same applies to a blank status, or the portal's own "Search not performed" — neither says anything about the person, so neither is recorded.
Verifying through Oho also links your organisation to the worker in the OCG system. That linkage is what makes NSW different: the OCG then notifies your account directly when a worker's status changes, so a suspension can reach you between scheduled checks instead of waiting for the next one.
Reading the result
Every check resolves to one of these outcomes:
| Status (as shown in the app) | Colour | What it means | API value (eligibility) |
|---|---|---|---|
| May engage | Green | Valid and current — the person is cleared for the work. | MAY_ENGAGE |
| May not engage | Red | Not valid — expired, suspended, not found, or a match on a ban register. | MAY_NOT_ENGAGE |
| Under review | Yellow | No decision yet — someone has to read the result and record one. Not a softer kind of pass: the worker counts as non-compliant until they do. | REVIEW_REQUIRED |
| In progress | Blue | Still being checked. | IN_PROGRESS |
| Couldn't verify | Grey | The source couldn't be reached; Oho will try again. | ERROR |
Validity and expiry are tracked separately from that verdict, and the badge always shows the most serious state on record — so these appear instead of one of the five above:
| Status (as shown in the app) | Colour | What it means | API value (statusDetail) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expiring soon | Yellow | Still valid, but inside your expiry lead time — 30 days by default. Time to get the renewal moving. | EXPIRING_SOON |
| Expired | Red | The expiry date has passed, so the worker is no longer covered. | EXPIRED |
| Conditions to review | Yellow | The register attached a condition or a notation that someone has to read and decide on. | CONDITIONS_TO_REVIEW |
| Pending decision | Blue | The issuing authority has yet to decide on an application. | PENDING_DECISION |
A problem the register reports outright — the clearance revoked, no matching record, a newer card superseding this one — shows under its own name in red or grey, alongside the same statusDetail value. Every one of them is listed in what a check result means.
NSW returns its own status wording, which Oho maps as follows:
| What the register says | What Oho shows | Why |
|---|---|---|
Cleared, Not barred, Valid | May engage | Current clearance |
Barred, Prohibited, Refused | May not engage | An active bar on child-related work |
Interim bar | May not engage | Barred while under assessment — treated as not clear |
Expired | May not engage | The clearance has run out |
Application, Pending | In progress | Applied for, not yet decided |
Not found, No record, no result | May not engage | Nothing on the register matched these details |
| Anything else | Under review | Wording Oho doesn't recognise — worth a person reading it |
NSW distinguishes the two, and so should you. Not found usually means the details didn't match — a typo, a name change, or a wrong date of birth. Barred, prohibited or refused is an active problem with the clearance itself. Both show red, but only the first is likely to be your data.
When it doesn't verify
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| May not engage — not found | Number, name or date of birth didn't match the OCG's record | Check all three. A missing or wrong date of birth is the most common cause |
| Not found despite a valid card | The date of birth stored on the credential doesn't match the card — it's a separate field from the worker's profile | Open the credential and compare its Date of Birth with the card and the OCG record, not just the worker's profile. After fixing it, ask support to re-check it |
| Nothing ever comes back for one worker | Their organisation isn't covered by the NSW verification source, or they have none — the check is skipped rather than failed | Check their organisation against the source's list |
| May not engage — not found, after a name change | The OCG may still hold the previous surname | NSW has no alternate-name retry, so update the worker's name to match the register, then ask support to re-check it (why) |
| In progress that doesn't resolve | The worker holds an APP number and hasn't been decided yet; the portal login isn't set up; or — on a card that has never had a result — the family name or date of birth on the credential doesn't match the card | Check the number — APP means an application. Then check the Verification Source has valid credentials. Then compare the credential's Family name and Date of Birth with the card (why) |
| Interim bar | The worker is barred while the OCG assesses them | Treat as not clear. This isn't a data problem |
| Under review | The portal returned wording Oho doesn't recognise | Open the check and read the raw status; raise it with support if it looks like a new OCG status |
Every NSW check fails at once, run report reads Error checking accreditations: Error: Could not log in. | The OCG portal sign-in is being refused — the password changed, expired, or the account is locked | Sign in to the OCG portal yourself to find out which, then replace the password secret on the source |
Renewals & monitoring
Renewals flow through on their own — a renewed clearance keeps its number, so nothing needs re-entering.
Because of the employer linkage, NSW gives you two overlapping safety nets: Oho's scheduled re-checks, and the OCG's own notifications to your linked account. It's the one state where a change can reach you without Oho having asked.
Note that a change of clearance type does need attention: a volunteer moving to paid work is issued a new number ending E, and the V number on file will start coming back as not found. That's a data update, not a compliance failure.
Related
- Credentials overview
- How monitoring works
- Working With Children Check (VIC) — for comparison, a public-register state
- Organisations — which workers a source covers