Working With Children Check (SA)
A Working With Children Check (WWC) is the clearance required to do child-related work in South Australia, administered by the Department of Human Services (DHS) Screening Unit. South Australia publishes no public validation page, so Oho signs in to the DHS Screening Unit portal on your behalf.
Who needs it
Anyone engaged in child-related work in South Australia, employees and volunteers alike.
What Oho needs
The check number, the holder's full name, and their date of birth — South Australia won't match a worker without one.
SRN 1234-5678 — an eight-digit Screening Request Number. Oho tidies the formatting for you, so SRN12345678, srn 1234 5678 and 12345678 all reach the portal in the shape it expects.
Older records may carry a six-digit DCSI number instead, from before the Screening Unit was renamed: 123456. Oho accepts those too.
South Australia matches on first, middle and last name together, not just a surname — so a middle name on file that the register doesn't hold, or vice versa, can be the reason a check doesn't match.
Like NSW, the DHS Screening Unit matches on date of birth, and a worker without one can't be checked. If you're importing, fill in Date of Birth; see Spreadsheet columns.
Before you start
South Australia needs your organisation's DHS Screening Unit portal login, configured once as a Verification Source. There's no anonymous route — the portal is the only way to check an SA clearance.
Sign-in is protected by a one-time code. Oho can collect that code automatically from a dedicated mailbox, which is set up when the source is configured; where it can't, an administrator supplies the code once and Oho holds the session for a couple of hours.
A wrong password or a locked account doesn't come back as "this worker isn't clear" — it comes back as an error. If every SA check turns red or errors at once, look at the Verification Source before you look at the workers.
How Oho verifies it
Oho signs in to the DHS Screening Unit portal and searches for each worker. Once signed in, a check takes well under a minute — most come back in five to thirty seconds.
On the first successful match, Oho registers your organisation's interest with DHS on your behalf. The worker then appears on the portal's monitored list, and later scans read that list — so a status change is picked up without a fresh search each time.
Reading the result
Every check resolves to one of these outcomes:
| Status (as shown in the app) | Colour | What it means | API value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | Cleared, but worth a closer look — for example a condition on the clearance, a possible match, or an expiry coming up. | REVIEW_REQUIRED |
| In progress | Grey | Still being checked. | IN_PROGRESS |
| Error | Grey | The source couldn't be reached; Oho will try again. | ERROR |
South Australia has its own status vocabulary:
| What the register says | What Oho shows | Why |
|---|---|---|
Cleared, Not Prohibited | May engage | Current clearance |
Not Cleared, Prohibited | May not engage | An active bar on child-related work |
Cleared, but past its validity | May not engage | Cleared once, now expired |
| No matching record | Under review | See the note below — this is not treated as a failure |
| Anything else | Under review | Wording Oho doesn't recognise |
On most registers, no matching record means red. Here it means Under review.
The reason is that SA matches on three name parts plus a date of birth, so a non-match is far more likely to be a data mismatch than a genuine absence of clearance — and marking a worker as not clear on that basis would be wrong. It's routed to a person to look at instead.
When it doesn't verify
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Under review — no matching record | Name, date of birth or number doesn't match the Screening Unit's record | Check the full name including middle names, then the date of birth, then the number |
| Under review after a name change | The register may hold the previous name. SA has no automatic alternate-name retry | Update the worker's name to match the register and re-run |
| Error — sign-in failed | The portal login is wrong, locked, or the one-time code couldn't be collected | Check the credentials on the Verification Source. This is a source problem, not a worker problem |
| In progress and never resolves | The SA source isn't fully configured | Confirm the Verification Source has a portal login and an organisation mapping |
| Under review on many workers at once | Usually a name-format mismatch across an import rather than a real compliance problem | Look at one worker in the portal to see what name format it holds, then fix the import |
| Two SA sources and neither is used | Oho couldn't tell which organisation's login applies | Map each source to its organisation so the right login is picked |
Renewals & monitoring
Renewals flow through automatically — the check number stays the same, and the registered interest means DHS shows the updated status on the monitored list.
Because the interest registration does the heavy lifting, SA monitoring is efficient: later scans read the monitored list rather than re-searching every worker. The thing to watch isn't renewals but access — the whole arrangement depends on your portal login continuing to work, so a password change on the DHS side is what breaks SA monitoring, not anything about the workers.